


I’m Your National Anthem

by aghamora



Series: and the bible didn’t mention us [3]
Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Alternate Universe - Politics, American Politics, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Smut, F/M, Secret Relationship, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2018-12-05 07:07:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 43,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11572929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: The D.C. gossip mags wouldn’t take kindly to the president’s daughter screwing an agent on her Secret Service detail. Said president would probably take to it evenlesskindly.Luckily said daughter couldn’t give less of a shit – about either of them.





	1. January

**Author's Note:**

> I realllyyy can’t promise regular updates for this just based on how my RL has been lately, but I wanted to publish this so I have more motivation to finish it, because I love this idea. Like, buckets of love. So, be patient and more chaps will come, I promise. Right now the total number is set at 8, but that might change based on how things turn out.
> 
> If any of you have been following me for any length of time, you'll remember I've been talking about doing a bodyguard au for literal decades... but it never materialized, and instead it evolved into this, which I think has a lot more potential.
> 
> Finally, [here](http://remezcla.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/brink10-Esai-Morales-Latino-President.jpg) is a picture of Laurel’s dad playing the president of the US in some other role to get you in the… mood? (Sexual and fic-tual)

Laurel would really rather stab herself in the eye with one of her stepmother’s Louboutins than venture into the fresh hell that is the inaugural ball.

But she doesn’t exactly have a choice; if the president’s own daughter doesn’t show her face it’ll whip up a firestorm of rumors, rumors the new administration can’t afford amid scandals involving her father’s business dealings outside the country, and so she dresses in the tasteful Oscar de la Renta gown her stepmother’s staffers had chosen for her, adorning it with a silver bib necklace and leaving her hair loose and curled around her shoulders. The dress is flag-stripe red, appropriately patriotic for the daughter of the newly-elected Republican president, and fits her immaculately, though she does feel like a bit like a walking traffic light slash prostitute wearing it.

She’d prefer blue. But there’s a time and a place for those kind of protestations, if she wants them to accomplish anything, so she can wait. She's good at waiting.

It’s a nauseating sort of opulence, this kind of event; all the stuffy Washington elite and high-profile donors, vying for a post, a cabinet appointment, some other less-than-legal favor like sharks smelling blood and circling in the water. She watches the first couple shuffle their way through a painful first dance to a Sinatra song, and try to look at least moderately in love with each other for the sake of the photographers. She pastes on a simpering smile as she stands on stage with her siblings behind her father, only half-listening to his twenty-minute-long, vainglorious ramblings, before escaping the spotlight and assimilating back into the crowd.

Laurel hones in on the first server in possession of champagne like a heat-seeking missile, and spends a while trading the requisite pleasantries with the children of senators and congressmen and campaign staffers, until she reaches her threshold of politesse for one evening and finds herself seconds away from breaking the champagne flute in her hand and slitting someone’s throat with the shards – or her own, preferably.

If Kan were here, he’d probably be able to talk her down from the edge, quell her rising homicidal thoughts, or at the very least distract her from them. She’s glad he isn’t, for once, though; it’s nice not to be soldered to his arm like a smiling plastic mannequin, to be able to roam around and hide herself away when it gets to be too much.

After a while she retreats to the outskirts of the party – after grabbing another glass of champagne, of course, always her crutch at these sorts of functions – and winds up over by a window, peering out into the city lights dancing on the Potomac and rubbing her lips together as the live string quartet carries on merrily nearby, doing nothing to offset her mood. Normally she’s at least passably good at pretending to be happy, the consummate politician’s daughter, that shining face in the family lineup, but tonight she can feel herself wavering, dancing far too close to the fire of madness, to screaming in this suffocating gilded cage.

She spends a while staring out the window and stewing, before turning around and peering back into the crowd – only to startle when she notices a Secret Service agent has taken his place behind her, back pressed against the wall, straight as an arrow. He might almost be mistaken for another ballgoer if it weren’t for his earpiece, and her mood sours at the sight of him; that’s something she’ll have to grow accustomed to as well, unwanted protection, unwanted eyes always on her wherever she goes.

She doesn’t need the Secret Service. At this point, she thinks she’s down to give any would-be assassins an open invitation to put her out of her misery.

“Are you following me?” she snaps, suddenly, tongue loosened by the liquor flowing hot in her blood.

There’s a flicker of something in his eyes, bright blue; mirth, like ripples on a pond after a stone has been cast, as if he’s amused by her. But his lips don’t twitch into a smile, and otherwise he remains perfectly stoic, silent, the hard angles of his profile softened by a beard framing his lips. He’s hot enough, she thinks, so maybe the Secret Service won’t be all bad if they look like him.

“Are you mute?” Laurel presses, making her way over to him, because the bartender here is some uppity sixty-year old man, not someone she can particularly confess her troubles to freely, and she thinks this guy just might do the trick. “I mean, is that a thing with you guys, here? The ones on the campaign trail would at least talk to us.”

A twitch at his lips; almost imperceptible, but Laurel perceives it, and narrows her eyes when he opens his mouth to speak, still staring straight ahead, refusing to meet her eyes. “Not mute, Miss Laurel.”

“You know my name.”

No answer, at first. The truth of the matter is that she’s impossible _not_ to know, now, though for the most part she’s still only Jorge Castillo’s youngest, shiest, oft forgotten daughter, and the photogs chase her older sister Vanessa and her bunch of brats with far more zeal. She plays to them in a way Laurel doesn’t, dazzles in a way that’s never come naturally to her, and Laurel doesn’t begrudge her their attention.

The press labels her _The Wallflower in the White House_ , and she can’t say it isn’t an accurate epithet.

“It’s my job to know your name,” is all he offers, and Laurel gives a soft hum of acknowledgement.

“If I said I was going to kill myself,” she begins, suddenly, a bit too loudly, “would you classify me as a danger to myself and like, try to tackle me or something?”

That finally gets him to look at her, and he furrows his brow. “I don’t-”

“Or if I said I was going to kill my dear father, the president,” she continues, stepping closer to him, raising her chin. Daring him to do something, and she doesn’t know what, or even why, “even if I’m his kid, would I be a threat to his life? How’s that work?”

He’s looking at her, now, and it’s clear he doesn’t know how to deal with this situation, if he should take her seriously or laugh at her, five feet and four inches, very much unarmed save for a few potential shards of glass in the form of her champagne flute, threatening the life of her father with hundreds of witnesses around, to an agent sworn to protect his life. It’s patently stupid. Liquor always makes her patently stupid.

“Threatening the life of the president is a felony under the United States Code Title 18, Section 871,” he divulges, finally, tone clipped, professional, though she can tell he still wants to laugh at her. “I’d be forced to neutralize the threat. Which, in this case, would be you.”

“Ah,” she says, raising her eyebrows. She steps closer, until she’s a bit too close for comfort and she knows it. She wants to see him fidget, flinch, locate some crack in his composure, like standing toe to toe with one of those expressionless, puffed-up guards at Buckingham Palace. “And… how would you do that?”

The grin bleeds into his eyes, but he directs them straight ahead, looking past her instead of at her. “I think it’s best I not go into specifics.”

“Darn,” she fake-laments, sighing. “And here I was having so much fun planning this hypothetical assassination with you.” She turns away from him, sipping at her champagne, even though it’s about her sixth or seventh glass and her stomach is starting to feel a bit like she’s swallowed Coke and Mentos. “I’d be doing the American people a favor, y’know. Because trust me-” She smirks over the rim of her flute. “They have no idea who they’ve just made the leader of the free world.”

Jorge Castillo’s campaign was, in many ways, a perfect political recipe; enough social conservatism and family values to appease the right, mixed in with a dash of mostly-feigned support for same-sex marriage with a few pride flag photo-ops to appear tolerant, topped off with a cleverly-crafted ad campaign about his plight as the son of Mexican immigrants to sway Latino voters.

Tough on immigration, though. Religious, but for appearances only. Strong on defense. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs – if Laurel has to hear that word one more time, she may follow through on this whole slitting her own throat thing after all. Cutting corporate taxes. The former Florida governor and his Colgate smiles and picture-perfect family had won the hearts of the nation.

“He won on the backs of Latinos. Mexicans,” she remarks, more to herself than to him, not even really caring if he’s still listening to her. “Pretended to give a shit about a path to citizenship and amnesty – when really, he’s just gonna deport them all the first chance he gets so he doesn’t look soft, screw them over. Oh, and women, too. He’s wanted me barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen since my quince, so. Bye-bye reproductive rights.”

She takes a greedy swig of champagne, wishes desperately they were serving something stronger. “And don’t even get me started on the NRA and all the millions they threw at his campaign. Because guns are great, right? All we need is more guns to… combat the guns, I guess?” She shakes her head, curling her upper lip in disgust. “He’s a money-hungry son of a bitch and a megalomaniac who could give a shit about anyone outside the top one percent and I didn’t vote for him.”

It’s a slurred, impassioned rant, one she should probably be keeping to herself at this particular function, but it feels liberating, at least, to say it out loud, even if this agent probably couldn’t give less of a shit. She sounds pathetic, the disgruntled liberal, sore loser, that tired cliché she knows her father would mock. She needs to keep her damn mouth shut; if there’s a reporter nearby and it leaks to the press that the president’s own daughter didn’t vote for him, the administration will be a laughingstock.

She kind of really wants to leak that to the press, now.

“They might as well serve Kool-Aid,” she sneers, taking another sip. “Everyone here’s already drinking it anyway.” She pauses, making her way back over to him, suddenly determined, teetering a bit in her heels. “You’re a good listener, ….?”

She pauses, prompting him for his name, which he gives, still without looking at her. “Frank.”

“Frank,” she echoes, moving closer to him again, emboldened in her intoxication. “Can I be frank with you, Frank?”

That earns her some eye contact, however brief, and she smiles, but it withers, quickly, curls up and dies on her lips, twists into something hideous and jagged. “He’s a monster. No one knows it, but-” She bites out a laugh, thick, almost teary. “I do. I know it.”

Still, she gets nothing, and she’s not quite sure what she expected anyway. Sympathy? Fucking sympathy – she’s the daughter of the most powerful man in the world who also happens to be richer than the God he pretends to believe in; she’s not someone who needs even the most minute scrap of sympathy. Maybe she’d expected him to say something, at least, give even the slightest reaction, a flicker of feeling, but ‘Frank’ just stands there, still as a statue and twice as impassive, and she laughs, again, at his stoicism, but mostly at her own stupidity.

“Well,” she says, bleary-eyed and teary-eyed, makeup smudged, blubbering like a drunk sorority girl and fully aware of how ridiculous she looks. She gives him a smile, another tiny, shriveled thing that lasts only a second. “My advice, Frank? Don't ever take a bullet for our dear Mr. President here.” She gives something like a snicker. “Because I can guarantee you he'd deserve it.”

Someone is calling a toast, on stage, calling the crowd’s attention – her brother, it looks like, though she’s drunk off her ass and not exactly seeing straight – and the interruption draws their conversation to its natural end, though it’s not as if ‘Frank’ had been planning on answering her anyway. So Laurel turns away, stumbling a little, and staples another wilting smile onto her lips, holding it in place, and making her way back into the lion’s den.

Showtime.

 

~

 

Her father summons her to the Yellow Oval Room at an ungodly hour the next morning.

Because that’s a thing that happens to her, now: she gets _summoned_. For what, she doesn’t know, couldn’t give less of a shit. She’s far too hungover to care, though it’s probably just breakfast, and rolls out of bed to tug on a pair of jeans and a passably nice blouse; her closet is already immaculately arranged, the staffers moving with expert efficiency to settle the new First Family; a unit she’s unlucky enough to be included in, as it stands.

The Yellow Oval Room is sufficiently yellow and sufficiently oval, all ancient furniture and too much damn light; an assault on her corneas more than anything. Tragically there’s no food awaiting her at all; instead, there’s only her father in a pressed charcoal grey suit, next to a row of four people, clad all in black as if attending a funeral, hands folded in front of them and expressions austere, as severe as their postures, almost military. It makes Laurel feel like she ought to straighten her own spine to fit in, and she’s in the middle of doing just that whilst taking inventory of the figures in the room when-

Her eyes fall on familiar ones. Bright blue, jarringly clear. A hint of mirth in them, buried deep; so deep it’s as if it’s meant only for her to see.

Frank.

“Mija!”

Her eyes snap over to her father, just in time for him to cross the room, reach out, and plant a kiss on her forehead; Judas kiss, she thinks briefly, before letting her own internal panic attack swallow up the thought. He takes her hand, leading her over to the others, and gesturing with a grand sweep of his hand, before his gaze settles on a woman standing in front of the others; dark-skinned and sharp-eyed and not appearing to be even the least bit friendly.

She doesn’t offer a smile, a greeting, but she doesn’t need to for Laurel to recognize her; Annalise Keating, in the flesh. She’s as formidable in person as she’d looked every time Laurel has seen her before, in articles and on television, the take-no-prisoners and take-no-shit type. She’s a good half a head taller than Laurel in heels, and holds out her hand, which she takes hesitantly, shaking it, eyes flicking over to look at Frank again before meeting Annalise’s.

“Mija, this is Annalise Keating, Director of the Secret Service, here to brief you on your protection detail.”

“Nice to meet you,” is all Annalise offers, without giving her any impression that statement is even remotely true.

Laurel nods, and swallows. “Likewise.”

“I’d like to introduce you to your Secret Service detail,” Annalise says, straight-faced, and gestures to the four people standing beside her, as if acknowledging a housefly buzzing around the room. “They’ll be with you at all times, whenever you leave the Residence, and-”

Laurel stops listening right about then, letting Annalise’s voice fade out of her consciousness for the most part, as her eyes drift down the line. She catches the name of the first, _Nate Lahey_ , who gives her a nod and looks amicable enough, and also looks like he could probably snap her wrist like a twig, given the opportunity, though she supposes it’ll be _other_ wrists he’ll end up snapping, if need be.

There’s another man next to him whose face she can’t place, at first – young, vaguely reminiscent of a frat boy in a suit attending his formal – but after a moment it hits her; Justice Millstone’s son, named something pretentious that starts with an ‘A,’ and until she learns his real name she decides she’ll settle on _Asshole_ , for the time being. It’s an apt enough nickname, if she’s being honest, because the Millstone’s are notorious old money, the summer-house-in-Kennebunkport type, and there’s a distinct lack of gravitas in the way he carries himself that leads Laurel to believe he hasn’t risen above all that.

She wonders why the hell he’s here. Then decides, really, that she couldn’t care less.

Next is a short woman; petite, mousy, with close-cropped blonde hair. Her eyes look too big for her face, just like her suit seems too big for her body, hanging a little loosely off her frame, and Laurel can’t help but be perplexed – because she’s not physically imposing, not in the least. Quite the opposite; it looks like a stiff wind could blow her over, but Laurel knows as well as the next person that looks can deceive, and so she reserves judgement until further notice, finally settling her eyes on the last in the lineup: Frank.

And the first thing she notices about Frank is that he’s almost, _almost_ smirking. Because Frank seems to think this is all some huge goddamn joke.

“-and this is Frank,” Annalise’s voice cuts into her reverie, as if he needs any introduction. Laurel meets his eyes, tries not to fidget. “He’ll be heading up your detail.”

Well.

As if she should really be _surprised_ things have gone from bad to worse.

“And they’ll be with me at… all times?” Laurel asks, throat tightening, praying she doesn’t sound as breathless as she is, because Frank is still staring at her like he can see through her as easily as a piece of plexiglass, and she resents that. Resents _him_. “Everywhere?”

Annalise gives a curt nod. “Except when you’re here, and when you are they’ll be posted at entrances, stairways. Only a call away if you need them.”

“Great,” she blurts out, swallowing and fidgeting a little, her eyes darting back over to Frank. “I, uh… think I’ll take a walk. If Frank wants to come, he can brief me on everything else, I guess.”

Her father furrows his brow. “Annalise can brief you anywhere you like.”

“No, I think-” She cuts herself off. “I think I’ll just talk to Frank, if you don’t mind.” She takes a step toward the door, and the others make to follow her, automatically, only to freeze when Laurel holds up a hand. “No – just… just Frank, thanks.”

There’s something behind Annalise’s eyes, for a flicker of a second. Laurel doesn’t think suspicion quite describes it, but there’s something there, undeniable, an inkling of an idea which she, perhaps wisely, doesn’t verbalize and instead lets die before it can reach her tongue. Finally, she just nods again.

“Of course.”

She starts to take a step toward the door, eager to escape, but before she can her father calls out after her, voice sharp, “Oh – and don’t forget. Prayer service at the National Cathedral at eleven. Elena has a dress for you.”

Laurel contemplates praying for a heaven-sent bullet between the eyes for most of the journey down the stairs and outside, into the frigid January air. She tugs on a pale pink wool wrap coat and frowns, because as much as she’d hated the oppressive humidity of Florida, at least it was familiar, gave her some degree of freedom to dress in short shorts with plenty of bare skin, not bundle herself up every time she steps outside like a damn Eskimo. It’s unseasonably warm for January, she gathers, even unfamiliar with this climate as she is, and Frank trails behind her silently as she steps outside, not bothering with a coat, also not bothering to give her a word.

His silence is more unnerving than his words could ever be, anyway.

The garden is barren, the few trees dotted about black and withered, the shrubbery all spindly twigs, and there are none of the eponymous roses to be seen; it looks like a wasteland. There’s no polite way to start this conversation, by remarking on the beauty of the garden – because the garden looks like shit – or by making an observation about the good weather – because the weather is also shit – and so finally Laurel steels herself, glancing sideways at Frank where he walks, staggered ever so slightly back behind her, and gets to the point.

“Did you know?” she asks, tone clipped, not bothering to inject any venom into the question. She sighs, and watches her breath rise like steam. “Last night, that you were the head of my detail?”

He stares straight ahead, that same infuriating amusement dancing on his features. “I did.”

Laurel glowers; not at him, in particular, but rather at the world, the garden around them, at everything, even God, that smug bastard and his shitty ass sense of humor, giving an irritated huff under her breath. She opens her mouth to reply, but before she can Frank comes to a halt, hands behind his back, that same, very slappable smirk from before threatening to widen.

“With all due respect, can I be frank with you?”

Laurel stops, and her next glower is very much directed at him. “As long as you… never say that again.”

“I don’t care. About your voting record or your daddy issues,” he says, plainly, and Laurel seethes. “I’m here to do my job. Protect you. That’s it.”

She softens, a little. “So you won’t… tell anyone?”

“See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. That’s my motto,” he answers, still with a bit too much bravado to make her dislike him any less, far too familiar with her for someone she barely knows. He grows serious, all at once. “I won’t tell anyone. You have my word.”

“Okay,” she breathes, raising her chin and raising herself to her full height, which, if she’s being honest, doesn’t compare to his, but she’s grappling for an upper hand she can already sense is slipping, figures she has to do something. “Then we understand each other.”

Again, Frank looks like he wants to laugh, in that subtle, infuriatingly composed way of his, but he doesn’t. Instead, he just nods, and is about to say something when he brings his hand up to his ear, suddenly, a faint, garbled message coming over his earpiece. He listens, for a moment, then directs his attention back to her, nodding at the imposing white prison behind them.

“Prayer service in half an hour,” is all he says, shortly, unerringly professional when he needs to be, and for a moment Laurel almost believes she might be able to tolerate him. “Better get you back. Can’t keep the good Lord waiting.” She nods, and changes course, just as Frank raises his arm to his mouth, speaking into his sleeve. “Got it. Wallflower’s en route.”

Laurel perks up, and scowls over at him, incensed. “Wait, is… is that my codename? Who picked that?”

Frank doesn’t answer. He just follows her back into the house, his silence mocking her with every step.


	2. February

 

“Y’know, I could get used to this. I feel like I’m with a celebrity.”

Laurel snorts and glances up at Michaela over the rim of her glass of water, which she traces idly with one finger, wetting the tips of her fingers with condensation. “I’m glad at least one of us is having fun. And are you saying I’m not a celebrity?”

“An _unwitting_ celebrity,” she corrects herself over the chatter of the crowded little mom-and-pop bistro around them, all classic and quaint and homey, yet somehow still alienating to Laurel. “You could at least enjoy it while it lasts.”

“Enjoy what?” she snorts, and glances around the room where her detail is scattered, with Frank standing still as a sentinel by the door. “Being stalked by my detail and the paparazzi constantly? Or the part where I have to pretend I don’t want to die at all times of the day, every day? Because I’m not totally against someone John Wilkes Booth-ing me right now.”

Michaela scoffs. “You’re dramatic.”

Laurel takes a sip, humming. “You know there’s a soundproof music room on the third floor of the house? Clinton had it put in. I’m thinking about following his lead. Taking up saxophone as I slowly descend into madness.”

“Okay, why not just move out if it’s that bad?”

She shrugs. “I’m in between apartments. Plus, my dad wants me there to be his live-in photo-op so he can look like he gives a shit about his kids – at least until I leave for law school.”

“And you didn’t just tell him to fuck off?”

“I should’ve. But, alas. Here we are,” Laurel remarks, staring down into her chef’s salad with a distinct lack of appetite before forking a piece of lettuce with more force than she needs. She should’ve, should’ve told him to shove his money and any number of things in any number of very unmentionable places, and it makes her hate herself for not doing just that, letting him disown her if he wanted. “If I tried to leave now he’d probably send the Seals after me or something. Or – well. Not like I go anywhere alone anymore, anyway.”

This time, her gaze falls on Bonnie – the short, blonde woman she assumes she’d underestimated before, if her experiences with her this past month have been any indication, stone-cold like Annalise as she is – stationed by what must be the hallway leading to the bathrooms, not making much of an effort to blend in at all. Michaela follows her gaze, before her eyes dart over to Asher, Justice Millstone’s son, instead, conversing merrily and a bit too closely with a busty female waitress.

He’s blending in, at least. She figures she has to give him credit for that.

“What’s Justice Millstone’s son doing on the Secret Service anyway?” Michaela wonders aloud, and Laurel chortles, examining a veined piece of lettuce and twirling her fork around.

“His dad is doing that privilege check thing. Told him to get a real job and somehow got him onto my detail. Like it’s gonna do any good.” She finds her eyes yet again, almost subconsciously, focused on Frank, and for a moment, quicker than a flash of lightning, she swears she catches him looking back. It only makes sense; of course he’d be watching her, but there’s something in his stare that feels like he’d be watching her anywhere, even if they were two completely different people in another life, even if she weren’t his charge at all. “He’s not even the worst one.”

“Who is?”

“By the door. Beard,” is her expeditious description, because really she need say no more. She lowers her voice, sending another surreptitious glance his way and tugging the sleeves of her cashmere sweater up around her hands. “Don’t look too fast, he’ll know we’re talking about him.”

Michaela turns, slowly, always good at being discreet, and once she’s turned back she raises her eyebrows. “He’s hot. Is that the issue?”

“No,” Laurel snaps, a bit too fast to be convincing, and prays the blush she can feel sizzling her cheeks doesn’t give away the fact that she has, indeed, noticed that. She’s noticed that a whole _lot_. “No – you know I’m dating Kan, he-” She cuts herself off, sighing. “His name’s Frank. He’s an ass. I got… sort of tipsy at the inaugural ball, ran my mouth to him about my dad before I knew he was my detail leader. Now he thinks I have daddy issues.”

“Don’t you?” Laurel gives an incredulous scoff, but the other girl continues before she can cobble together a coherent retort. “How’s it going with Tall Dark and Boring anyway?”

Laurel pauses before answering, choosing her words with utmost care – because she likes Kan well enough, sure, liked him for the distraction he provided on the campaign trail, all those never-ending months of speeches and rope lines and fundraisers and rallies, liked him for the warm body he offered next to her at night in freezing hotel beds, the friendly face he never failed to be on the campaign bus, but there’s never been fire, fierceness in the way they touch, and she’s never entertained the idea that she could actually love him.

He worked for her father’s campaign; as such, her father approves. He has aspirations to run for Congress in his home state’s second district. Likeable. Passably attractive. On the surface, he might as well be perfect.

Scratch that surface, and there’s regretfully little beneath.

“We’re fine,” she tells her, sufficiently vague, as chipper as she can make herself sound these days.

Michaela looks skeptical. “Just fine?”

“Good,” Laurel hastens to correct herself, gnawing on her lower lip. “We’re good.”

“You’re a shitty liar,” she informs her, straight-shooter as always; Michaela knows her better than she’d like to admit, has since their freshmen year at Brown, two highly incompatible roommates sussing each other out before finally, hesitantly, settling on a tentative friendship. “But, if you want a distraction, something tells me Agent Beard over there would be more than happy to give you the mustache ride of your life-”

“Oh, God, Michaela we’re in _public_ -”

“Please, do not pretend you’re a prude,” she remarks, in between bites of her muffin. “And don’t start buying into your own ‘devoted Catholic daughter who’s saving it for marriage’ charade either, because I definitely don’t want to be friends with that girl.”

“Is that what America thinks of me?” Laurel asks, though she’s not sure she really wants to know the answer. “That I’ve got a Jesus-loves-me stick up my ass?”

“Mmm. Could always do a poll on _The Herald’s_ website and give you the results.”

She snorts. “I’ll pass. And this is all off the record, by the way.”

“Please, I’m ethical,” she shoots back, offended, before her eyes soften, brown and honey-warm. “You know I don’t go on the record with my friends.”

Laurel smiles, relaxing somewhat for what feels like the first time in months. Michaela can grate at her nerves, sometimes, knows how to push her buttons like a sister would, but she has to admit it’s a breath of fresh air to talk to someone unafraid to tell her something other than what they assume she wants to hear, a trend that’s become irritatingly prevalent with the staffers at the White House, all gritted teeth and simpering smiles. More than anything, it’s just nice to have a damn _friend_ , and she knows Michaela well enough to know she’d never try to leverage their relationship to get a story out of her, though she may be a cutthroat reporter in every other respect.

She has more than a few she could give her, happily. But all in due time. Everything in due time.

“When was the last time you got out?” Michaela asks, an air of sudden determination about her. “Like, _really_ got out and got shitfaced?”

Laurel blinks. “… Why?”

“Because,” she says, bluntly, as she rises to stand all at once, grabbing her purse, like she’s made a decision Laurel clearly gets no say in, “you look like you need it. I’m getting you out of here. We’re ditching the suits.”

Her eyes fly around the room, only to find her detail staring at her with renewed interest – all except Asher, who is still carrying on what must be an engrossing conversation with the same waitress’s boobs. Frank perks up, especially, preparing to jump back into motion, and Laurel gulps.

She lowers her voice, hissing, “What are you talking about? We’ll never get away from them-”

“Yes we will,” Michaela tells her, and raises her chin with a smirk. “I’ve got a plan.”

 

~

 

Five or six hours later, and Laurel has no idea where she is.

The only upside to this, she figures, is that neither do Frank & Co. – _or_ her father.

She does, however, have a vague idea of how she got here: sneaking out the back door of the café’s kitchen with Michaela after pretending to go to the bathroom, hopping in her car and speeding back to her Logan Circle apartment, pregaming like a couple of college kids for a few hours, before she borrows a leather jacket and pair of Michaela’s jeans, and heads out with her to a club that’s a little bit too skeezy for her taste, but one that Michaela seems to frequent. Which is where the having no idea where she is part comes in – because she doesn’t, can’t remember how they got here, how long _ago_ they got here, what this place is called or how many drinks she’s had or where her bag is, though all of those issues seem admittedly inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things.

She’s not as drunk as she’d like to be, if she’s being honest, because she’s always held her liquor well and has the very faint, niggling notion in the back of her mind that she needs to retain at least a sliver of sobriety – which she hates, but feels the need to abide by nonetheless.

“You sure no one recognizes me?” she slurs, shouting over the deafening bass of the speakers, just as Michaela finishes sucking down a shot of tequila and jamming a lime between her lips. She doubts it, personally, because she’s always had the uncanny ability to blend into the walls when she needs to – _wallflower_ , like Frank calls her, like everyone on her goddamn detail calls her now because of that stupid fucking codename – but even in the semi-darkness of the club, she can’t be sure.

“Who cares?” Michaela shoots back, doing an awkward, wiggling little dance move before thrusting a shot in her direction. “If _you_ still care, you’re not drunk enough. Catch up!”

Laurel hesitates, but downs it, grimacing and not bothering with a chaser, just in time for Michaela to thrust an arm around her and lean in close, bleary eyes locked on something across the room.

“Don’t look now,” she sing-songs, as Laurel follows her eyes to a pair of men at a table across the way, “ _but_ , that guy over there is eyeing you up like he totally wants to eat you out for dinner.”

Laurel takes in the sight of her, dressed to the tens in a fuchsia bodycon dress, and quirks an eyebrow. “Okay, if anything, he’s looking at you.”

“I don’t think sooooo,” she drawls, cocking her head to one side and watching as the two men stand, approaching with drinks in hand and almost painfully cocky gaits, though Laurel won’t deny the one who’d been eyeing her is good looking, if not a little too close to the Jersey Shore-type. Michaela leans in again, stumbling a bit in her four-inch pumps. “Uh uh uh, we are getting you drunk tonight, Miss First Daughter, and we’re _also_ gonna get your ass laid.”

The two step through the haze of smoke permeating the air, heavy and thick, and come to a stop before Laurel has the chance to reply, introducing themselves. They prove to be pleasant enough conversationalists, even if the smell of their cologne makes Laurel’s already churning stomach lurch, but they buy them another few drinks and after that, she can’t really bring herself to care much, as the world blurs and goes fuzzy around her, bleeding together as if in a watercolor, the pounding of the music but a muted, distant drumming, like a heartbeat in her bones.

She’s sandwiched in between Michaela and one of the two – Chad or Chase or Charlie, all ego and gelled hair squeezed into a too-tight t-shirt – when the music grinds to a halt, all at once. They freeze, the two guys cursing at whatever invisible club overlord controls the music, and Michaela following their lead, along with several others in the still sparsely populated place – until suddenly she goes still, lowering her drink, her eyes widening as they take in the sight of something behind her.

Some _one_ , rather.

“Alright. Party’s over, kids.”

Laurel feels a sudden, irrational rush of semi-drunk anger as soon as she hears it, that familiar accent – Philadelphia, it occurs to her. Fucking Philadelphia.

Fucking _Frank_.

She rounds on him all at once, indignant, and almost goes toppling over in the process. She catches herself at the last minute, though, and looks up, only to find him flanked by Nate, Bonnie, and Asher, as well as a few other agents she doesn’t recognize – backup, probably. None of them look particularly happy to be there, least of all Frank himself.

Well. She can’t say she didn’t see this coming.

“You – what… what the hell are you doing here?” she demands, incensed, raising her chin.

Frank just looks at her, unfazed. “Taking you home.”

“Uh, _no_ you’re not!” she cries, and stumbles back a bit, placing her hand on Chase-Charlie-Chad’s chest. “This is… what’s your name? Chase? Chad! This is Chad, and I’m going home with him.”

“Wait, who the hell are you people?” Chad demands, looking a bit twitchy and shifty-eyed, and Frank narrows his eyes at him, acknowledging him with all the interest one would a housefly.

“We’re the United States Secret Service,” Frank deadpans, arms folded, and Chad looks half-ready to shit his pants. “That’s the president’s daughter.”

Immediately, the other man holds up his hands as if at gunpoint. “I-I never touched her, sir.”

Frank stares at him. “Get outta here, kid.”

Chad and his friend oblige as though they’re being chased, ditching them at the drop of a hat and leaving Laurel seething in their dust, and Michaela standing wordlessly, scared stiff behind her. She grinds her teeth hard enough to break her molars into bits, half-ready to toss her gin and tonic into Frank’s face.

“What the _hell_ is wrong with you?” she sneers, taking a clumsy step toward him, wishing she weren’t so damn drunk that she could articulate herself properly. “You’re not my fucking father-”

“Your father,” he cuts in, “is worried as hell, and pissed we lost you. Now sober up. We’ll get you and your friend home.”

She takes a defiant sip of her drink. “I’m not going back to that place. So _fuck_ you.”

Again, Frank just gives her that penetrating blue stare of his, though this time it’s mixed with a bit of incredulity, and that frequently-present condescending amusement, the same way someone might look at a yapping Pomeranian trying to bite at their ankles. He folds his arms, straightening his spine and letting out a long-suffering sigh.

“We gonna do this the easy way or the hard way?”

Laurel blinks. “The hard way? What the fuck is the har-”

She gets her answer when he scoops her up and slings her over his back, knocking the wind out of her.

“Hey – what the _fuck_ , put me _down_ you asshole, _let me go_ -”

She struggles, but she’s too hammered to put up much of a fight, and Frank just ignores her anyway, walking with her slung over him like she weighs nothing more than a feather, a drunk, furious, simmering heap of rage.

“We got them blockin’ cell signals here,” he informs someone, on his way toward what she assumes must be the back door, judging by her very limited field of vision. She doesn’t know who _they_ are, the unnamed powers that be up on Capitol Hill, her captors; she’s too drunk and indignant to ask. “Clear the place and check phones at the door. Anybody’s got pics of her, get rid of ‘em. And get her friend home, too.”

Eventually Laurel gives up, going limp over his back though she resents it, and letting him carry her down a hallway, past the bathrooms, out a back door. It leads into an alleyway, next to a dumpster, which is where Frank finally lets her down, taking a step back and dusting off his suit.

“Now. You gonna walk to the car or I gotta carry you again?” he asks, patient as ever, though his anger hasn’t faded; she knows he’s pissed at her, knows he probably has a right to be, though she’s loathe to admit it.

“You know, I don’t know why you’re on some kind of power trip,” she spits, cheeks flushed, hair a mess, well aware of the sight she must look right about now, “but you’re not in charge of me. My father doesn’t get to… to have someone fucking _fetch_ me.”

She sees something switch on, in his eyes. Up until now he’s been calm, reserved, professional, but when he takes a step closer to her, looming over her with his hands behind his back, it’s clear all that has gone out the window, momentarily.

“I ain’t here to fetch you. I’m here to do my job, and that’s to _protect_ you,” he says, and his voice isn’t a growl, but it’s deep enough that it has the same effect on her, might as well be. He speaks with a quiet, reserved sort of anger; doesn’t blow up, doesn’t yell, and his eyes are burning like blue flame, and suddenly she’s painfully, overwhelmingly aware of how _close_ he is to her. “You go ditchin’ us for fun, for some kinda revenge on your pops, and we _can’t_ do our jobs – hell, who knows if we’re even gonna _have_ jobs when we get back. Somethin’ coulda happened to you, and that woulda been on us.” He pauses, shaking his head, sneering. “And by the way, the rebellious little rich girl in a gilded cage act? Drop it. It’s cliché.”

He’s right. He’s right about everything, every single thing, but like fuck she’s going to let him know that, and like fuck she’s going to admit she’s done anything wrong, here, so instead she puffs out her chest, standing toe to toe with him, unafraid. She doesn’t back down, shrink away from any man, especially Frank – because he’s as intriguing as he is infuriating, doesn’t defer to her with a nod and a smile like everyone else, and she’s not letting him win here, although she’s no longer sure what it is she’s trying to win at all.

“Fuck you,” she says, again, the words lower now. She swallows. “You’re… you’re fired.”

That gets a laugh out of him; a burst, sharp and mocking. “Like it or not, princess, I don’t work for you. But don’t worry. I’m puttin’ in a transfer request first thing tomorrow morning.”

She can’t tell if he’s joking, and can’t find the words to ask, and also doesn’t particularly care; all she can do is follow him sullenly to the black Escalade parked out front and stumble her way inside, collapsing into a miserable heap in the back seat and watching Frank slam the door shut behind her. She winces, the sound amplified tenfold, feeling a hangover already brewing behind her eyes.

_Shit_ , she’s going to regret this in the morning.

 

~

 

Late that next morning when she sets out for her daily run in President’s Park, her detail a fixture as always by her side, she finds, perplexingly enough, that Frank isn’t among them.

She doesn’t ask after him at first, though, just loses herself in the feeling of the biting wind whipping at her face, the rhythmic clopping of her shoes against the trail, the sound of her breaths and the way they rise like hissing steam into the air. She’s dressed down, in only a tank top and running tights, but she doesn’t mind the cold, lets it creep into her bones and settle there, crystallize her blood into shards of ice; it makes her feel something, at least, the same way running gives her the faintest illusion of freedom.

Bonnie and Nate have no trouble keeping up with her, but it doesn’t take them long to lose Asher, who all but collapsed fifteen minutes in on the pavement, pleading for them to slow down. It’s only after he’s fallen behind that Laurel finally looks to her side at Bonnie, arms raised, eyes fixed ahead with steely determination, and opens her mouth, feigning nonchalance though her question is fully loaded.

“Where, uh, where’s Frank?”

She does genuinely like Bonnie, though she’s a woman of few words and even fewer facial expressions, always stern and flawlessly composed. From what she’s been able to gather from their interactions, Bonnie is the closest to Frank, seems to have something of a history with him, but Bonnie doesn’t react, just keeps her eyes trained on the trail ahead, always surveying the landscape for danger, listening for the tiniest snap of a twig, the softest whistle in the wind.

“He put in a request to transfer,” she says, flatly. “Nate and I will be heading your detail until they bring in a replacement.”

A transfer. She doesn’t remember a lot of what happened last night, but she does remember him saying that, hadn’t been able to tell if it’d been facetious or not. It sends a shock through her, though she tells herself it’s the cold; she’s never viewed Frank as someone to bolt when the going gets tough, up and quit at the slightest provocation. She’d been kind of an asshole to him, admittedly.

He’d _also_ been an asshole to her, to be fair. But it’s possible that two assholes don’t make a right.

“Oh,” she breathes, slowing her pace somewhat. “Do… you know why?”

There’s something in the look on Bonnie’s face that leads her to believe she does, in fact, know something she isn’t letting on, but she can’t seem to get past that ice-cold veneer of hers, chip it away with her questions, and Bonnie gives her no verbal indication of the fact.

Instead, she just lets out a breath. “You’d have to ask him.”

“You know where I can find him?”

“I might.”

“I want to see him,” she says, through her labored breaths. A single drop of sweat tumbles down the back of her neck, goes darting down her spine. “To apologize.”

There’s hesitation, in Bonnie’s demeanor, and Laurel doesn’t know why – not that she ever does, when it comes to Bonnie, mystery of a woman as she is. She’d almost venture to say that it’s disapproval, that Bonnie senses something is amiss, something maybe even she herself doesn’t know, yet, but Laurel shakes the thought away, refocuses her energy on lengthening her stride.

“If that’s what you want,” is all the other woman offers, lips pressed into a thin line, not giving her a date, a time, anything other than a vague confirmation.

Laurel lets out a breath. “I owe all of you an apology, for last night. I was out of line.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Bonnie tells her, tone clipped, dodging her efforts to get something more out of her; any hint of her true feelings, which she’s sure must have been similar to Frank’s, which is to say it’d probably also pissed her the hell off. She pauses, then adds, “I’ll set up a meeting with Frank. Professional.”

The caveat gives Laurel pause, though she can’t pretend she doesn’t know why, after Michaela’s not so delicate comment over lunch about Frank, after half a dozen moments and wayward, lingering glances before that that had been seemingly inconsequential, but carried weight nonetheless. There’s something in the way Frank looks at her that’s darker; beckoning, almost, a serpent bidding her to taste forbidden fruit, all his knowing looks and wry smirks and muttered comments. She’s not going to lie and say she hasn’t thought about it. She’s human. She isn’t above that.

She wonders if he has, too. Wonders if that’s why he’d requested a transfer – to put distance between them.

To save them from themselves. From something that feels disturbingly inevitable.

 

~

 

They meet on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, just after sunset.

She can feel Honest Abe’s marble gaze tracking her as she approaches, Bonnie and Nate and Asher in tow, but they hang back when she draws nearer, picking up on her silent directive to give them space. He’s seated on the steps when she arrives, hunched over with his hands clasped in front of him, illuminated faintly from behind, and even through the night she can’t seem to take her eyes off him; his gaze cuts through the darkness, settles on her too, until she can feel herself being watched from all angles, by everyone, front and back and living and dead.

She’s never seen him dressed down, before, and it catches her off guard to see him in jeans and sneakers and a long wool coat; he looks almost like an entirely different person, a _normal_ person. Away from the glitz and grandeur of the White House and hidden by the night, Laurel almost feels normal herself.

“Hey,” she greets, voice smaller than she wants it to be, as she comes to a stop a few feet away from him, near one of the Doric columns bordering the exterior.

Though his face is thrown into shadow, she sees him look up, assessing her with a look she can’t quite read. “Hey.”

“Thanks,” Laurel tells him, sinking down onto the steps beside him and maintaining a more than safe distance, out of professional courtesy but out of something more like fear, too; fear of the unknown, of something unseen lurking inside her, catching in the air between them like wildfire, a match threatening to drop on a trail of gasoline which leads straight to them. “For meeting me.”

He raises his eyebrows. “When the first daughter calls, can’t exactly refuse.”

She considers that, wonders if he means it to sound like it does: that he had no other choice but coming here to see her. Ultimately, she decides not to dwell on it. “Right.”

Silence settles over them like sediment, thick and heavy, not quite comfortable. Her eyes drift, and she finds herself peering down the steps where the others stand, catching Bonnie’s gaze; Bonnie, who seems to be watching them just a bit too intently, before she looks away and turns her back, ostensibly under the guise of keeping watch. There’s something about Bonnie, something disconcerting Laurel can’t quite place; she always seems to be watching too closely, for just a second too long. She looks troublingly perceptive.

Laurel wonders what it is, exactly, that she’s perceived.

“Bonnie told me you put in a request to transfer,” she says, finally, glancing sideways at him. “Why?”

“We got off on the wrong foot. Bad start.” He meets her eyes, seemingly nonchalant, but she thinks, more than anything, that it’s affected nonchalance. “I didn’t think we could be professional, after that. Plus…” There’s a twinkle in his eye. “You did tell me I was fired. Don’t think you like me all that much, either.”

She arcs an eyebrow. “I could say the same thing, couldn’t I?”

He wilts, a little. “Look, I said things I shouldn’t have. That was unprofessional.” He pauses. “I was… an ass, on more than one occasion.”

“Mmm,” she gives a hum of agreement, playing idly with the tassels on her scarf. “A misogynistic one, too. The daddy issues thing was a low blow.”

That gets a laugh out of him; genuine, for once, full-chested. She’s never seen him laugh like that, in any way other than the occasional, restrained low chuckles he’d give from time to time while on duty, always holding back, and it makes her gnaw on her lower lip, makes the metaphorical match drop one damning, metaphorical inch closer to that gasoline.

“You ask me to meet just so you could call me names?”

“No,” she replies, honestly, breathing out the words. “I asked you to meet because… I want you to come back, to my detail.”

That seems to throw him for a loop, but it shows only for a second. “Yeah?”

“You were a misogynistic ass, yeah – but I was, too. Not a misogynistic one, but… A general asshole.” She swallows, feeling the increasingly familiar winter chill embed itself underneath her skin, but doesn’t shiver. “I was wrong to do what I did, ditching you guys. It was stupid. I don’t know why I…” She presses her lips into a line, letting herself drift off. “You were trying to do your job and I made that hard for you, and… I’m sorry.”

“Sorry I said you have daddy issues,” he apologizes, though there’s a smile behind it, not much sincerity at all. “Though you kinda do.”

Laurel scoffs, unoffended. “You really haven’t repented your misogynistic ass ways at all have you?”

“Not a big fan of repenting,” he teases, with a shrug. “But hey. Least I’m a self-aware misogynistic ass, now.”

There’s something effortless about this, Laurel thinks as their conversation lulls again, ebbing and flowing, the hustle of the city like the distant drone of a hive around them, and that’s what it is; a hive that constrains the both of them, two bees beholden to their home, him a worker and she a queen, different in their places in society but alike in their confinement. There’s something about Frank that feels indebted, to someone; a sort of hopeless indentured servitude, as loyal as a dog that would lay down its life for its master. She doesn’t know what, or why, or _who_ that master is, and Bonnie may be perceptive, sure, but she’s just as much so, always has been. She knows it’s true.

With the silence comes a certain air of gravity, and the smiles fall from their faces, just as she looks over at him once more, before rising to her feet. “I, uh, I should probably go.”

She turns, makes to leave, but stops herself, suddenly, glancing back at him, only to find him looking up, watching her. He always _does_ watch her. It’s his job, maybe. But he watches her in a different way than the others do. Watches her with something like want simmering beneath the surface of his eyes.

Watches her in a way he really, definitely shouldn’t.

“Come back,” she tells him, simply, softly, unnerved by just how badly she wants it, how badly she wants to see him. How badly, perhaps, she wants to do so much _more_. “Don’t quit because of me.”

Laurel leaves him with that, descending the steps, disappearing into the night.

His eyes follow her as she goes. This time, they’re the only ones she can feel.


	3. March

Things don't get better.

In fact, there seems to be only one way for them to go, and that way is down. She’s convinced her life has devolved into some lucid nightmare she can’t escape, caught in an infinite loop, until she finds some hidden key to free herself, cracks the code – like she’s the poor sap of a protagonist in her own shitty biopic.

Not that she’s interesting enough to have a biopic made about her, anyway. President’s daughter. Spoiled rotten. Daddy issues. Frank put it best – the rich girl in a gilded cage act. The worst cliché in the book.

 _God_. If she were watching this, seeing her world from the outside in, she’d probably hate herself even more than she already does.

She chokes down her disdain, though, bitter as it is. Plays her part to a T, like she’s done since she was old enough to walk, old enough to toddle along behind her father as living, breathing, screaming proof of his commitment to family – as if the simple act of procreation is somehow a testament to anyone's upstanding character. She spends her days working part-time at Elena’s nonprofit to avoid being idle, attending her father’s public appearances to fill out the family lineup, or occasionally her sister’s book tour, feigning interest in Vanessa’s sage advice on work-life balance, when really Laurel knows she has a strict one-nanny-per-kid ratio and has maybe changed half a diaper her entire life.

She’s not important enough to spearhead her own initiative, relegated to a smaller role as the youngest child, and for that she’s grateful, able to duck out of the spotlight and fade to the background during Nessa’s signings, during Elena's visits to local schools to promote her anti-bullying agenda whilst conveniently ignoring the GOP’s proposed cuts to free school lunch programs nationwide.

At least the kids won’t have time to be bullied. Laurel supposes starvation will just get them, first.

So her life becomes an endless cycle of tedious events and equally tedious days at Elena’s foundation, and it’s not torture, not an inhumane existence at all, but a flat, unremarkable sort of misery, neat and clichéd – like she is. Not even her misery is interesting.

Today, though, she’s making the best of it, and also making her best attempt to fade into the background at a reading event at the Smithsonian with Nessa; something to interest girls in STEM, she thinks, though she was only half-listening to the staffer who briefed her on it. She reads a few picture books with them, feigning as much enthusiasm as she can muster and talking animatedly with her hands, before letting Nessa take over and retreating back out to the car, the imposing tank of an Escalade.

Asher opens the door for her, and she finds Frank seated behind the wheel, slouched slightly, one hand resting idly upon it, suit and sunglasses clad as always. He turns his head back to look at her once the door slams shut, and it unnerves Laurel, a little, to not be able to see his eyes behind the dark tint of the glasses; it keeps her from reading him, and she never knows where he's looking, what he's thinking, though in the past month they've reached a tentative understanding, maybe even started to build what she might call a shaky sort of friendship.

Friendship. That's all it is. They can't be anything more. Probably they shouldn't be friends at all, should exist in each other's spheres solely out of necessity. It would be best, although Laurel isn't sure how possible that is, now, after everything.

“Where to?” he asks, and Laurel massages her temples, leaning back against the seat with a sigh as the bloodcurdling screams of children reverberate around the inside of her skull.

“Can we sit here for a bit?” she replies, finally, closing her eyes. “I need a minute.”

He seems amused. “Not a fan of screeching Mongol hordes of little kids?”

That right there – it's something she knows he shouldn't do: start conversations with her, speak when not prompted to do so. He's too familiar, not deferential enough, and maybe it'd make it easier if she did build that cold wall of professionalism between them, if she told him not to talk to her – but she does genuinely like Frank, and she's never found herself able to do it. Sometimes it feels like he's the only one who listens, who sees her for what she is; a person, flawed and human, not a smiling face on a TV screen, some character.

“I don't like kids,” Laurel tells him, bluntly, and he furrows his brow.

“Yeah?”

“Yep. Can't stand them, actually.”

“What'd they ever do to you?”

“They're...” She drifts off, knowing the answer full well; that sometimes she envies children their innocence, envies them the fact that perhaps she never really got to be one at all. Instead, she settles on: “Too honest. And loud. If they invite me to one of these events again, you have to promise you'll orchestrate my escape.”

He doesn't laugh. He pauses, thinking for a moment, before asking, “That what you want? An escape?”

Laurel cocks her head to one side. “Why?”

“Turn in early tonight,” he says, after a moment of silence, cool and casual as always, though there's something hesitant about his words too, like he's sending out feelers, gauging her reaction. “There's a back exit in the Residence stairwell, leads out to the Rose Garden; no one'll see you. Meet me there at nine. Leave your phone.”

She blinks. “What?”

“You wanna get away so bad? I'll get you away for a night. And this time,” he glances back at her, and grins, and it's a wicked, wry grin. It's a grin that makes her body hum in a way she can't seem to stifle, “we'll do it right.”

For a moment all Laurel can do is gape, looking over at him in astonishment – because God, he really, really shouldn't be doing this, offering to help her, free her. Beckoning her, a devil dressed up in a suit and sunglasses, disguised as an angel tempting her to paradise. Last she checked he didn't like her at all, not even a little, and for the life of her she can't help but understand why he would do this, volunteer to sneak away for a night and put his job on the line. It's reckless. Stupid. He doesn't strike her as the stupid type.

“Why would you...” She shakes her head and smooths down the front of her sundress, suddenly feeling exposed. Laurel settles her eyes on his face, searching for his, somewhere behind the blacked-out glasses. “Why would you wanna help me?”

“We both agreed I was an ass,” is his answer. He says it like it's the simplest thing in the world. “Let me make it up to you. Plus, it's my job to keep you safe, and it ain't gonna go over well if you decide you've had enough one day and fling yourself into oncoming traffic on my watch.”

She should say no. She really, _really_ should say no. The smart, reasonable thing would be to say no, and she needs to be both smart and reasonable here because there's no way her saying yes is good for either of them, when this plan endangers his job, when it very possibly endangers her life. But the thought of being spirited away sends a jolt of excitement through her, a childish thrill, like she's a teenager sneaking out, climbing from her bedroom window and dropping down into the dark unknown. It's stupid, but Laurel has the sense that maybe she hasn't done _enough_ stupid things in her life; she's always stayed in the shallow end, never strayed too far from the sidewalk.

Laurel sucks in a breath, finally, and relents, playing along. “Where would we go?”

Frank cranes his head to look back at her, and finally he reaches up, plucking the sunglasses off the bridge of his nose to give her a good look at his eyes, which sparkle with a roguish glint in them, catching the light at precisely the right angle and wringing all the air out of her lungs.

Maybe it's better he keep the sunglasses on, now that she thinks about it.

“Ever been to Philly?” he asks. 

 

~

 

He meets her after his shift right where he said he would; an obscure back exit in the Residence, shockingly unguarded in a place where Laurel had been certain ever single square _inch_ was guarded. She slips on a blue hoodie, quilted jacket, and jeans, tying her hair up and away from her face into a ponytail, and Frank gives her something like a nod of approval when she comes into view, still wearing his suit but having discarded the jacket in favor of a long wool coat.

“Good,” he tells her, eyeing her from head to toe, so closely it makes her want to fidget. “Left your phone in your room?”

“Yeah,” she breathes, and pulls her sleeves down to cover her hands, folding her arms. “I made sure no one saw me.”

Frank stops, for a moment, to assess, before coming to some unspoken conclusion and giving another nod. “All right. You ready to blow this popsicle stand or what?”

“We'll never get out,” she insists. “There're agents… cameras everywhere-”

“I got this,” he undertones, and moves in just an inch too close, ignites the air around them. “Trust me.”

She does, God help her.

She just hasn't figured out whether or not that’s a mistake yet.

In lieu of a verbal response, Laurel nods, and follows him out the back exit, into the night. It's still cold, though it's a thawing sort of cold with the faint promise of spring in the air, and she shivers, trailing behind Frank and glancing back furtively, to ensure they aren't being followed. She's about to ask where they're going when Frank comes upon another back exit, scanning his ID badge and leading her inside, this time to a sterile hallway, at the end of which is a flight of stairs, descending downward.

There's an agent posted at the top of them – one Laurel doesn't recognize; a man, stocky, dark-haired – but he doesn't question Frank as they walk past, doesn’t so much as move an inch. She holds her breath regardless, hurrying down the stairs behind him; there seems to be a tacit understanding, between the two of them, and she can't fathom what it is until they walk through another set of doors, finding themselves staring down a lengthy passageway, lit by dim, sickly green neon lights. It looks sterile, too, as sterile as the hallways in her mother's psych wards she remembers running up and down as a child, tennis shoes squeaking on the blue linoleum, a bird in a cage which, back then, wasn't quite as gilded, but was still a cage all the same.

“They told us about these,” she comments, breathless from their haste. “It's a tunnel out, right?”

“We don't use 'em much,” Frank explains as he sets off down the hallway, his stride so long she has to half-jog to keep up with him. “Just for emergencies, to get to the bunkers. The occasional philandering president. Or-” He pauses, and looks over at her. “When the first daughter wants to make her great escape.”

“He won't say anything? The agent back there?”

“Denver? Nah,” he assures her. “We know to be discreet. Like I told you. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.”

“You seem to speak a lot of evil,” she muses, and he laughs.

“Fair enough. Guess that one ain't my strong suit then.”

They come up a ways off the White House grounds, and Frank hails a cab for them on Pennsylvania Avenue, ordering the driver to take them to Union Station. The man seems to recognize her, but only shoots her a few questioning looks in the rearview mirror and doesn't remark on it, before dropping them off outside and accepting Frank's more than generous tip. As soon as he's driven off and they have a moment of stillness on the sidewalk, she stops Frank, hugging her arms to her body, jittery for a reason she can't explain.

“Wait,” she pants. “Someone'll recognize me, in there.”

“Alright, hood up. Take these,” he tells her, unconcerned, as he reaches into his coat pocket, withdraws his glasses case, and removes his sunglasses from inside, settling them gently on the bridge of her nose. His fingers come within centimeters of her skin, when he does, and Laurel tries not to tense, tries to ignore the inexorable rush of heat that hits her though it's well below forty degrees outside, and fails miserably on both accounts. “There. You're incognito now, wallflower.”

“No code name,” Laurel tells him, a bit more sharply than she intends. “I'm just...” She pauses. “Just Laurel, for tonight.”

He grins, and nods toward the building. “Whatever you want. Now let's go; train leaves in twenty.”

It's a mad dash to their boarding gate, but Frank has their tickets on his phone, and from there it proves to be relatively smooth sailing. Their seats are in coach, and it's a foreign experience for her; she's never sat in coach, anywhere, as far as she can remember, shuttled around on private jets since birth, on luxury buses during the last legs of the campaign. Frank must notice the look of mild confusion on her face, because he leans over slightly once they've both taken their seats, brows knit together.

“You good?”

“Yeah,” she answers, feeling around on the seat beneath her, acquainting herself with it. “I, uh, I've never sat in coach before.”

“Yeah? Well, you're slummin' it with me tonight. I'm gonna take you to the shittiest 24-hour diner I can find, have you eat the most disgusting greasy cheesesteak they got on the menu.”

She laughs, relaxing a little as the doors close, sealing them off from the outside world. She tugs off her hood and lets her hair down, but leaves the sunglasses on, though the train is mostly empty and she doesn't foresee anyone taking special notice of her; it’s one of her many talents, slipping under the radar when needed, looking entirely unremarkable.

“Hard pass, on the cheesesteak.”

“Aw c'mon,” he teases. “You really tellin' me you're gonna go to Philly and _not_ eat a cheesesteak? It's part of the experience. 'S like blasphemy.”

Laurel shrugs, flippant. “I've always been partial to blasphemy. Religious and… otherwise.”

“I can tell. You seem the type.”

She snorts, but doesn't reply; instead, she glances over at him, rubbing her lips together. “So... you're from Philly?”

“Born and bred,” he answers, and pauses as the train sets into motion with a jolt. He's close to her, closer than she'd prefer in the cramped seating, his shoulder brushing hers, and everything in her is telling her to move away, just as the voice of something much larger and far more insistent drowns it out, draws her in closer.

She shakes the thought away. “Which part?”

“Place called Fishtown.”

“I've never heard of it.”

“Used to be all blue collar,” he explains, a note of something like disdain in his voice. “Now it's chock full of yuppies and all their quinoa and weird artisanal bakeries. But, it's still home.”

“You have something against quinoa?” she jokes, before leaning her head back and letting her eyes slip closed, not giving him much of a chance to reply. “Why Philly, of all places?”

She can feel him give a shrug, beside her. “You needed a getaway. I know the city. If I'm gonna lose my job for kidnapping the president's daughter, might as well have a good time doin’ it.”

She freezes, all at once, almost recoils as if she’s been slapped. Laurel knows it's a joke, well-meaning, harmless. She knows there's no way he could possibly understand how the word turns her blood to ice, how it digs up a million and one memories which flash like a bloody reel of film behind her eyelids, but immediately she shuts down, goes dark, forced back into herself just as she'd thought she was starting to relax. More than anything, it makes her throat tighten with something like frustration, that she should still be like this at all, haunted by memories even years later, what feels like an entire _lifetime_ later.

Back then, those nights she spent in that concrete box of a basement, in some remote, abandoned house south of the border, she'd thought of surviving only in the literal sense, in terms of keeping her heart beating, making it out of there still breathing, somehow, as the hours ticked by and slowly faded into days, weeks. Now she knows it's a process, not something she ever really ceases doing, though sometimes it's so exhausting she wants to lay down, never get up, shut herself away from the world.

That would be surrendering. That would be giving up. She's not that girl. She's Laurel fucking Castillo, and she is going to do exactly _none_ of those things.

She's grateful for the sunglasses shielding her eyes, but Frank seems to sense something is amiss regardless, must sense the shift in the air between them, because he asks, gently, “You okay? I was just joking.”

“I'm fine,” she pinches out the words through tight lips, a tight jaw, and does her best to unspool the tension in her muscles. “I think I'm just gonna get some sleep, for a bit.”

Frank accepts that, and she thinks she hears him reach for a magazine tucked into the seat pocket in front of them, the pages crinkling faintly when he opens it. “Suit yourself. I'll wake you up when we get there.”

Laurel gives a hum of acknowledgement, settling herself back against the seat, releasing a breath.

She doesn't quite manage sleep. He's far too close to her for that.

 

~

 

For the first time in ages, she feels free, unfettered, unbound by her name.

She can finally breathe, again, swept up in the rush of the city, dressed in plain clothes; no one recognizes her as she walks down the street with Frank at her side, gapes at her like a gussied-up animal in a zoo. She’s never been happier to fade into obscurity; she’s never longed for the spotlight, reveled in it like her father. She despises that codename – _wallflower_ – but she can’t say it isn’t accurate.

It may be just the illusion of freedom; a delusion of normality. Untenable. In only a few hours, when the sun rises, it’ll be over – but she intends to enjoy it while it lasts, every last second.

Frank makes good on his promise to take her to the shittiest 24-hour diner he can find, settling on one in West Philly, and she pretends to complain only to give in not long after, scarfing down a cheap cheesesteak packed with grease and cholesterol and carbs and probably half a dozen different kinds of carcinogens. There’s no possible way to eat it daintily, and Frank chuckles as he watches her across the table in their little booth, shoving the sandwich into her mouth and licking her fingers clean to attempt at least some semblance of table manners.

“If anyone’s recording me right now,” she mutters, swallowing a bite of cheesesteak, “it’s gonna go viral tomorrow, and it’ll be all your fault.”

“No one is. ‘Sides,” he teases, unwrapping his own on the crumb-covered table before them, “I like a girl who can eat.”

She hums, in between bites. “Mmm. As opposed to a girl who – what? Photosynthesizes?”

He seems caught off guard by her quick wit, and blinks. “Y’know, I gotta say, you really aren’t the prissy rich kid I thought you were.”

“For the record, you’re still the dick I thought you were,” she shoots back, good-naturedly. “But maybe you’ll prove me wrong one of these days.”

She finds herself surprised, again, by how easy it is to be with Frank, how naturally they jive and how easily the conversation flows, hardly ever lulling. With Kan, with everyone, it always feels like work, pasting on her brightest smiles and choosing her words with the utmost care while walking the press line. Now, here, there’re no one’s eyes on her but Frank’s, and with their roles reversed and her donning his sunglasses instead, she has the freedom to look at him; _really_ look at him, something she doesn’t allow herself to do, much.

All her life she’s been averting her eyes, pretending she doesn’t notice the things she does, and it sets her at ease to be able to stare at him – and even more so to find him staring back, with a sort of subtle fascination, buried deep, but perfectly visible. The longer she knows him, the more she finds how incredibly easy Frank is to read, those eyes of his hiding nothing, betraying his every emotion.

She thinks it’d be easier if they hid more, hid everything. She thinks it’d be easier if they didn’t make it so damn clear how much he _wants_ her.

“Where to next?” he prompts, two cheesesteaks and root beer floats later. “Liberty Bell? You’re the first daughter, you’d be into that.”

Laurel chortles, plucking the straw out of her glass and sucking on the end of it. “I couldn’t give less of a shit about the Liberty Bell.”

He rests his elbows on the table, leaning forward. “You’re a bad patriot.”

“Maybe so. You’re the expert; what else is there to do around here?”

“In the middle of the night? Get shitfaced. Though I wouldn’t recommend it, based on how that went for you last time.” She scoffs, and he thinks for a moment, before standing suddenly, slapping down a twenty for their food. “I got an idea. C’mon.”

She looks down at the money, a twinge of guilt coiling her stomach. “I can cover it, Frank-”

“My treat,” he says, holding up a hand to stop her. “You’re slummin’ it with me tonight. I’ll foot the bill.”

She thinks about insisting, but decides against it. It’s nothing, in the grand scheme of things – ten dollars for an admittedly mediocre cheesesteak and root beer float – yet somehow it feels like more, especially given the disparity in wealth between them, and Laurel ponders that on the way out the door, gnawing on her bottom lip as they hail a cab. Frank gives the driver an address, somewhere in Fishtown, and ten minutes later they’re pulling up in front of an old row house; two-story, with an iron gate encircling the front.

It’s not a rough neighborhood, from what she can tell; probably blue collar, like Frank mentioned before, and she frowns as they step out onto the street, coming to a stop on a sidewalk littered with cracks, weeds poking up in the spaces between them. The street is silent and still, peaceful, and it washes over her like a tide, releases the tension in her shoulders. There's something serene about it she can't put a finger on.

“This is it,” he announces finally, gazing up at the place with a wistful grin. “The Delfino family home.”

Laurel slides her sunglasses off to get a better look. “Your parents still live here?”

He nods. “More ‘n thirty years. They’ll die before they ever sell.”

He’s brought her to his home. She doesn’t know why, why he’d choose to share this part of himself with her, but she stares up at it almost reverently, stunned into silence, touched in a way she can’t describe.

“Are we doing the whole meet the parents routine already?” Laurel jokes, and he chuckles.

“Think my ma'd have a stroke if I brought home the president’s daughter.” He pauses, licking his lips. “Sure they’re asleep anyway. But – hey, this is it. The real Fishtown. I’d be a traitor if I didn’t at least bring you by.”

“You’re close to them?” she inquires. “Your parents?”

He nods. “Total mama's boy. I take the train back almost every weekend for Sunday dinner.”

“That must be nice,” she murmurs, a bit distant, distracted. “Not hating your family.”

“You should come with, one day,” he tells her, not pressing but nudging the suggestion toward her gently, hands tucked into his pockets. He looks almost sheepish, flustered, like a schoolboy, in that cavalier, disarming way of his. “Can’t guarantee they like your dad much. But, I bet they’d like you.”

“Yeah, well. Me and your parents have that in common.” She looks over at him, curiosity piqued. “Do you? Like my father?”

Frank gives something like a huff, a grin unfolding onto his lips. “My pops is an auto mechanic and I’m a blue collar kid from the heart of Philly. My collar ain’t the only thing that’s blue, if that's what you're asking.”

They stand in silence for a moment longer, side by side, not speaking. Laurel doesn’t think they need to; they understand each other like this, without a word, and the blare of sirens several streets over plays like a distant song in the background, washing over them. He didn’t have to do this, she knows; take her home, show her this part of him, his origins, where he came from, something strikingly intimate. She isn’t sure why he did.

“I take back what I said,” she declares suddenly. She turns to him, arms folded, mind made up. “You’re not the dick I thought you were after all.”

He laughs softly, eyes glinting blue-gold beneath the streetlights. “Step in the right direction, at least.”

Eventually, long past the point she loses track of time, they end up down by the river, on a pier; Frank told her the name of it but she can’t remember, can’t really be bothered to. They stop by a convenience store on the way, pick up a couple of beers, hop a fence, and drink them down by the water, which looks black as tar in the night, the city lights glittering across it like a canvas of stars. It’s cold but not bitterly so, and it seems, somehow, warmer and milder than D.C, more temperate. The monolithic silhouette of the city skyline rises up in the distance, horizon starting to brighten with the threat of dawn, those first few rogue rays harbingers of morning, a new day; almost ominous, to Laurel.

They’ve talked for hours. Yet there still seems to be so much left to say, not nearly enough time left to say it.

“This is awful beer,” she deadpans in between sips, leaning over the railing, wondering, briefly, what would happen if she were to drop down below; how deep it goes, how fast and far the current would carry her.

If he'd catch her.

Frank takes a drink, unbothered by the taste. “Hey, you committed to slummin’ it tonight. You’re getting the full experience.”

“Thank you,” she blurts out, all at once, a bit clumsily. “For doing this. I think I really… really needed this.”

“If you needed to get away so bad, you coulda just asked – stead of pulling that stunt with your friend.”

“I can’t take credit for that, actually,” she confesses. “That was all Michaela.”

“Even so,” he teases, moving a bit closer, almost as if to nudge her with his elbow, but something holds him back, at the very last moment. “You left your phone on you. You weren’t slick.”

“I’m sure I’ll get better at it over the next four years.”

“Don’t,” Frank says, suddenly, something serious in his voice; almost like fear. He seems to realize the abruptness of the word, because he clears his throat, shakes it off. “Don’t go ditchin’ us again, okay? You need to get away now ‘n then, all you gotta do is ask. It freaked your dad out.” His voice drops lower, takes on a rasp of tenderness. “Freaked me out, too.”

All she can seem to manage is a whisper. “I, uh… I won’t. I promise.”

They lapse into silence, for a moment; barely a second, before Frank stands up a bit straighter, clears his throat again.

“I saw your speech at the RNC,” he says, out of the blue, and it’s such a non sequitur that it throws her for a loop. “You were good.”

She gives a faint huff around the rim of her bottle. “My dad’s speechwriters worked on that for weeks. I just had to smile and read the teleprompter.” Laurel pauses, rubbing her lips together, unable to keep the contempt out of her voice. “Press saw right through it.”

She remembers that stuffy July night, the jitters that had run under her skin like live wires as she’d stepped onto that stage, in front of the eyes of the nation. Kan had kissed her on the cheek before she went on, given her a few soothing words which had done nothing to soothe her at all, but she’d played her part well regardless, kept her chin raised and her voice strong, clear. Afterward the press had lauded her eloquence but ridiculed the speech’s overall lack of substance, deeming it a transparent, vague tribute to a distant father; a half-hearted attempt at humanizing Jorge Castillo.

Not that her doting father had been there to see it, anyway. He’d already flown back to New York for the night with Elena, left her a couple hundred miles behind.

“Still,” Frank’s voice breaks through her reverie, pulling her back to the present, grounding her. “You spoke well. You’ll be a hell of a good lawyer.”

Laurel blinks. “How do you know-”

“I do my research. Brown. Economics, minor in poli sci. Summa cum laude.” He nods, as if out of respect. “Impressive. Law school next?”

“In the fall. I got into most of the top fourteen. My dad’s pushing Georgetown.”

“We got a law school here,” he mentions, almost as an afterthought. “Middleton. Not top fourteen, but it’s good.”

“I’ve heard of it. It’s late in the application cycle, though. I… don’t know if they’d take me.”

“Please, you could go anywhere and you know it; you’re the president’s kid. But more than that.” He pauses, looking her over, up and down, considering something. “You’re smart. Damn smart.”

Laurel doesn’t believe him for a second. “Uh, didn’t you just say that my escape attempt before was dumb?”

Frank relents with a shrug. “Didn’t say you were smart about everything.”

“You know what? I take back my taking back that you’re a dick,” she says through a laugh. “You still are.” Laurel pauses, feeling heat rise to her cheeks, the beer making her blood run ever so slightly hotter than normal, loosening her tongue like a slip knot. “What about you? What’s your story? You and Bonnie… you two seem like you have history.”

“She’s like a sister to me, if that’s what you mean. But we do. We started together at the field office out here, with Annalise. Then got moved to the fraud division in D.C. Then presidential protection, and then…” He gestures vaguely to where they stand, side by side. “Well, that’s how you got stuck with me.”

“Annalise,” she echoes. “Keating, you mean?”

“It’s a long story,” he admits. “But she got me into the Service. Bonnie, too. We owe her. We're… like family.”

Laurel drains the last dregs of her beer, as she watches beams of light gradually rise and widen across the sky, signaling the end of their time, the last few grains of sand slipping through this hourglass in which they've encased themselves. She knows he has them booked on a train back, soon. Knows she has a life to get back to – and more specifically a _Kan_ to get back to, even though Kan feels like a half-remembered dream, a man she knew only in a past life long ago.

“I don’t wanna go back,” she laments, ever the gloomy, brooding drunk. “Let’s just… Let’s not.”

Frank looks skeptical. “Your dad finds out you’re gone, we’re both gonna be in deep shit. Me especially.”

“You know how to hijack a plane?” Laurel wonders aloud, ignoring him. “Let’s commandeer Air Force One. They’d never be able to shoot us down.”

“Hey,” Frank lowers his voice, taking a step toward her, eyes soft. He looks sympathetic, something like longing in his gaze, like he wants that, too. Wants to run from things he can't escape and never look back. “You know we gotta go back, Laurel.”

He’s close. Closer than he’s ever been, though she’s not facing him directly, body still angled out toward the water - for her own good, she reasons, because she doesn't know what will happen if she turns, gets too close. She can feel the heat of him, though, the way it slices through the cold, drifts toward her, and her mouth runs dry, and she wishes desperately she had more beer to sip, to avoid having to find her voice and answer. She’s heard him say her name before – that tight, formal _Miss Laurel_ – but this is different, deeper, gravelly, laced with meaning, with _wanting_. And he’s giving her that sad-eyed look, like a damn puppy – and really, more than anything, she wants to kiss it right off his face, yank him close and seize his lips while they’re still under cover of night, while she’s still just Laurel and he’s still just Frank, in this world of blissful anonymity.

But she doesn’t. She just gives a solemn nod, her head suddenly heavy, vision fuzzy from exhaustion.

“I know,” she says, because she does; she understands. She doesn’t move away from the railing, though, just stays where she is like she's cemented there, until finally she turns to face him, giving him a slow, sad smile. “Thank you, for tonight. You really didn't have to-"

Frank shrugs that off before she can finish. “'Course I did. Now we better get going. You 'n I got a train to catch.”

He should be hard to see, through the thickness of the night. He always seems to be hard to see, alternating between sunglasses that hide his eyes during the day and hiding himself in darkness at night, but she can see him so clearly now, his outline like a specter in the shadows. It half-feels like maybe tonight was a dream, that she'll wake up tomorrow and none of this will have been real – and she supposes it won't, not really, once they return to their lives in the city. No one will ever know but the two of them.

 _Their little secret_. She likes the sound of that. She wants to have a lot more of those, with him.

Laurel falls asleep on the train back, and wakes with her head resting lightly on his shoulder, her body slumped to the side in slumber. Again he's looking at her in that way he shouldn't, all that blue-eyed tenderness, a note of something deeper beneath, and she straightens her back as quickly as she can manage, clearing her throat and moving away. Neither one of them mention it, after.

Neither one of them forget about it, either.


	4. April

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey hooooooooo, we back at it kids!!! 
> 
> Just because I had to be extra, I made a playlist for this fic [here](https://8tracks.com/aghamora1/ss-au). Give it a listen, if you're looking for some mood music.

2:43.

Laurel checks the time with an impatient huff, before sliding her phone back into her purse and turning her attention up the way, at her father, baby-kissing and glad-handing a row of supporters along a barrier, keeping them contained, like animals in a pen swarming the hand feeding them. Active duty soldiers and their families, mostly, she thinks; only a select few babies to kiss. Not that he really needs babies when he has half a hundred service members here anyway.

They’ll suffice, for the sake of the cameras.

“Hey,” Kan undertones, leaning in close. His hand settles itself on her lower back; comfortingly familiar, steady as an anchor. “You good, babe?”

“Fine.” Bored out of her goddamn mind; if he’s asking, she must look it. But technically fine.

She can feel eyes burning into her back, sizzling across her exposed skin, and she doesn’t have to turn to know who they belong to, though she does anyway, craning her neck to look back and finding Frank there, always a constant presence nearby. She can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but she’d be willing to bet he’s staring at Kan’s hand where it rests on the small of her back. She wonders if he’s envisioning his hand there instead – not lithe like Kan’s, softened by a lifetime of wealth, but rough, large, ever so slightly calloused, fanning out protectively across her spine. Holding her close. Stroking one finger idly along the back of her dress, right where her bare skin ends and the material begins. Right where he could make her feel it.

Laurel puts the brakes on that train of thought before it can venture any further. She’s seriously got to get a handle on herself.

2:44. Or so she assumes; counting Mississippi’s does have a certain margin of error. Frank is still watching her. She can still feel it. She wishes he would stop. Wishes he wouldn’t.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four.

She’s on about her twenty-sixth Mississippi when she hears it – and the sound doesn’t register for what it is, at first. It sounds like an explosion; a firework. A decisive _pop_.

Close. It’s close. Too close.

It doesn’t register until her ears are ringing and there’s a body thrown on top of her, heavy enough to crush, and she can’t breathe, can’t move. Not Frank. Not Asher. Not Bonnie. Nate – most likely, shielding her body with his, and he’s yelling something, but it sounds as if he’s a thousand miles away, as if he’s underwater and she’s trying to listen on the surface, his voice hopelessly muffled. Everything moves in fast-forward, skipping like a malfunctioning reel of film, yet somehow it’s all slow-motion. Voices, one after another, swelling into a chorus of panic. All inaudible, surreal.

Her thoughts come hopelessly fragmented, half-garbled radio signals. She doesn’t recognize the voices, screams. Her knees ache. She thinks they’re bleeding, cut open on the concrete. It feels almost childish, like she’s tripped and fallen on the playground.

“ _Get down – get down! Everybody down!_ ”

“ _We have shots fired at Fort Belvoir._ ”

“ _Evacuate Warrior – now._ ”

Warrior. Her father’s codename; he’d insisted on that, ostensibly because it sounded badass. Her personal opinion is that it’s pretty fucking stupid.

“ _Is he hit?_ ”

“ _No. Get him back to Stagecoach. Wallflower too._ ”

“ _We have an agent down, over here._ ”

One voice jars her back into reality. She’s being yanked up, half-dragged, half-carried. Nate. She’s like a doll in his grasp, limp, only barely able to make her legs move her forward. Bonnie and Asher are at her sides, Kan stumbling along with them. There’s blood, blood from the cuts on her knees, blood on her palms from scrapes there, too, stark red, dripping down on her white dress like paint on a canvas. Blood. But she’s not hit. She’d know if she were hit.

 _Frank._ He isn’t there. Where is-

_One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four._

They tick by in her head, almost unconsciously, a child’s rudimentary method of timekeeping. Her ears are ringing and suddenly that little internal countdown is all she can hear, her heartbeat and the sound of blood pumping in her ears drowning out all else. She’s dimly aware of Bonnie all but shoving her inside the waiting limousine, Kan falling in after her, before the smaller woman hops in as well and slams the door, turning to her. There’s nothing about Bonnie that would indicate this is a crisis situation at all; she’s perfectly composed, equanimous, face as blank as slate, operating with robotic speed and precision. Almost inhuman.

Laurel is still trembling when Bonnie moves in, without warning, pushing her back against the seat, running her eyes up and down her body – and she’s about to shove her off, demand to know what the hell she’s doing, when all at once Bonnie moves back, nodding as if in approval.

“You’re not hit. Good.”

A car door slams; the driver’s side. Asher appears behind the wheel, stunningly collected for all his inexperience, and Bonnie barks out an order, some direction, something Laurel can’t quite understand, before he starts the engine and sets off. Her words sound garbled, nonsensical, like gibberish. Her ears are still ringing. Frank isn’t here. He would be. Should be.

_Frank._

“Where’s Frank?” she chokes out, looking to Bonnie. “They… they said an agent was down, where’s-”

“Wallflower is on her way to Crown,” Bonnie ignores her, speaking over her radio; Laurel feels like she might as well not be there at all, invisible, screaming her lungs out in a soundproof box. “We’ll meet you at the bunker.”

“Where’s Frank?” she demands again, more sharply this time, and Bonnie looks her way, thinking for a moment – and that hesitation is all she needs to know the truth. “Bonnie, where-”

“Everything’s going to be fine,” is all she offers in the way of placating her, terse, sufficiently vague. “We’re taking you to an emergency bunker under the Residence. You’ll be safe there.”

Laurel opens her mouth, begins to protest again, but before she can Kan moves forward, tucking an arm around her, drawing her close and returning his hand to her back, rubbing in idle, soothing circles. “Hey, hey. It’s okay, Laur. You’re okay. Everyone’s okay.”

 _No_ , she wants to say, staring down at her hands, at blood that doesn’t feel like her own. _No. Not everyone_.

 

~

 

They take her down to the same tunnel Frank had shown her; only now it’s Nate and Bonnie and Asher and Kan stalking along beside her, not Frank, and it feels eerily empty, haunted by ghosts; the kind comprised of residual energy, stuck eternally replaying the events of the past.

She can hear his voice so clearly still, cracking jokes about philandering presidents using these things to get in and out of the White House, looking at her with that knowing twinkle in his eye. No one has told her anything – but she knows; Bonnie and Nate and Asher’s solemn, ashen faces tell the tale quicker than any words. Frank would be here if it hadn’t been him, would’ve thrown himself on top of her instead of Nate, and she knows that, logically, yet some stubborn, malfunctioning part of her brain refuses to believe it.

Seeing is believing. And she _didn’t_ see him. She hasn’t seen anything. She won’t believe it until she does.

The bunker isn’t cozy, or designed for any sort of long-term inhabitation. It’s a concrete box with a table and chairs and an old, worn leather sofa in the corner, blast proof and soundproof and everything-proof, and the first thing she notices is how cold it is, goosebumps breaking out across her skin like hives. It’s an unfriendly place, all flickering, sickly green lighting, made even more so by the first face she sees when she steps through the door; her father, waiting there with Elena, her brothers still absent; off in San Francisco, it occurs to her, and Nessa is probably home with her brats on lockdown. Jorge stands the moment she appears, wrapping his arms around her, and she wants to kick and scream and shove him off, but she’s too numb to do anything but stand there, cold as death.

“Laurel,” he releases her name on a breath, burying his face into her hair. “Thank God you’re all right.”

He’s a good actor; always has been, for a man who once left her for dead without giving a single shit, she has to give him credit for that. He seems remarkably unshaken for someone who just had an attempt made on his life, though Laurel figures it wasn’t the first, anyway; probably won’t be the last, either. He doesn’t seem to _care,_ care that anyone was shot protecting him, that a man could die for him to live, and she wrenches herself free from his grasp before he can say another word, her stomach turning inside out at the thought.

“Frank,” she repeats, her voice breaking, suffocating in the musty air around them, in this tiny, cramped space with walls that feel like they’re closing in fast. She swallows thickly, cobbling together her composure only long enough to ask, “Where… where’s Frank, is-”

“Frank?” Elena echoes, her Botox-laden brow furrowed. She’s clad in an immaculate cream pantsuit, clearly having been interrupted in the midst of some dire task; designing the new White House china, most likely. “Honey, who’s Frank?”

“My detail leader, Frank, where-”

“Mr. President, if I may.”

A voice, suddenly. Bonnie’s. Laurel turns, and finds the shorter woman stepping towards them, deferring to her father, who gives a silent nod of approval, motioning for her come to a stop in front of Laurel. She clasps her hands in front of her, lips pressed into that ever-present grave line; an expression she seems to wear at every hour of every day, careful and measured and cool, an ice-cold veneer that won’t seem to crack no matter what the circumstances. Laurel would rather she yell, cry, do something, show some emotion other than this god awful _nothing_. She wants to slap her. She wants to scream.

“Frank was the agent down,” she says, not beating around the bush, and Laurel can’t breathe. She can barely hear her over the ringing in her ears. “We believe the bullet was intended for the president, but the shooter missed. He was hit in the chest. They’ve taken him to George Washington University Hospital. Last we heard they were bringing him into surgery.”

Her throat tightens. “Is he-”

“They don’t have a prognosis yet. I’ll let you know when they do.”

She stumbles backward, a bit, wobbling in her heels, and Kan reaches out, catching her by the arm. “Hey. Hey, El, you’re bleeding.”

She feels numb, oddly detached from her surroundings, her mouth full of cold cotton, limbs like weightless thousand-pound weights. When she looks down, she sees what he means; there are bloody handprints on her dress where she’d placed her hands, streaks of red and fainter pink. Blood on her knees, too, seeping from the scrapes there. But there’s no pain; she’d forgotten she was even bleeding at all. Her pain feels irrelevant. Unimportant.

“Don’t touch me,” is all she can manage. She wrenches herself out of his grip, sucking in a breath, backing toward the couch. “Please don’t touch me.”

She lowers herself down, something hot and tight welling up in her chest, latching onto her lungs, spreading like a cancer. Elena calls for bandages and antiseptic, and she barely feels the sting when Kan kneels before her, pressing a cotton ball down onto her bloodied knees to clean them. He doesn’t venture too close or dare to touch her hands, which she turns over and over, watching the blood dry into the creases of her palms with a sort of morbid fascination, with horror.

Frank could die. It’s an entirely real possibility. That’s what he’s there for: to protect them. Die, if need be. She’s known that from the start. She shouldn’t care. He isn’t anything to her.

He _is_. Even if she doesn’t know what.

After a while, Elena doses herself with Xanax a staffer brings her and chases it with vodka, taking a seat on a chair in the corner and drifting, not bothering to acknowledge her or anyone. Her father disappears off into the Situation Room. Kan is the only one who stays, and she knows why he’s so worried, terrified the gunshot had rattled loose something in her, something she’d buried deep in the ground under the foundation of that abandoned house in Mexico years ago – and it had, to some extent. But he can’t know the rest. Can’t know about Frank.

She feels guilty, but it’s fanciful guilt. She’s too numb to feel much of anything.

 

~

 

5:16.

The details trickle in slowly, and she’s lucid enough to catch most of them. Army captain. Likely case of PTSD. Possible political motivations. Dead, now. They vetted everyone on the base before the event. No one seems to know how he slipped through.

No news about Frank. Laurel isn’t sure no news is good news.

Kan stays, steadfast as ever, so good and soft and gentle, backing off when he senses she needs space, moving in when he feels the time is right. He persuades her to eat the tasteless granola bar they bring her, wipe the blood off her hands, and they hunker down to wait, agents stepping in and out periodically to update them on the situation. Elena keeps demanding to know when they can be cleared to leave. Laurel just wishes she would shut the fuck up.

It’s sometime around seven when a familiar head of blonde hair pops in from behind the sliding steel door; Bonnie, still on duty though her shift ended hours ago, looking no less alert than usual. Her stomach curls in on itself, the moment she sees her, because she can’t read Bonnie, not even remotely; she thinks she’d probably have roughly the same expression on her face if Frank was dead or if he were still living. It has to be something, though, and Kan must feel her tense beside him, because he rises, walking over to Bonnie and leaning down, listening as she whispers in his ear.

She stands when he makes his way back over to her. “What is it? Is-”

“He’s stable,” Kan answers, as Bonnie ducks out of the room, giving her one last gaze, something glinting sharply behind it. All the air rushes out of her lungs at once, a vertiginous current of relief pounding through her. “Made it through surgery. He’s gonna make it, Laurel.”

She can’t find her voice, knows anything she tries to say will come out sounding squeaky and pathetic, and so she just exhales again, closing her eyes and falling back onto the couch, still unsteady, shaken.

“Okay,” is all she can manage, holding herself back, measuring her emotions carefully to avoid giving the impression of overreacting, caring too much, in a way that might arouse suspicion, though she probably already has and she can’t bring herself to give much of a shit about it. “Okay… alright. Okay.”

“I can’t understand why he matters so much to you, dear,” Elena remarks from her place in the corner, in a way that only further convinces Laurel she has a computer chip inside of her as opposed to an actual beating, feeling human heart. “He’s just doing his job.”

Laurel can’t find the energy to glare at her. She just leans her head back against the couch, lets her limbs go loose, tension rolling off of her in waves. He’s all right. Frank’s all right. And that does matter. _He_ matters.

She doesn’t think she’d known just how much, until now.

They clear them to return to the Residence not long after, after deeming the shooter a lone wolf, and Kan brings her up to her bedroom, helps her undress and crawls into bed with her, spooning her from behind, warm skin on warm skin, his breathing grounding her; he’s always been good at that, grounding her, helping her be still. She’s still trembling faintly, tremors running under her skin like the aftershocks of an earthquake, but she can feel herself stabilizing with each passing second.

Frank is stable. She is, too. Getting there, anyway.

“It’s sweet,” Kan murmurs into her neck, as they drift together like a pair of unmoored ships, lose their grasps on consciousness. “That you care so much about that guy. Frank.”

Laurel doesn’t what to say to that. So she takes the coward’s way out: she pretends to be asleep, says nothing at all.

 

~

 

The press shows up in droves the day she visits him in the hospital, a week later.

They frame it as a story of American heroism, her the damsel in distress and him her injured knight in shining armor, the patriot – and it’s a sexist cliché, really, and she was never technically in distress, but the media generally seems to be a fan of sexist clichés, so she takes it in stride. It doesn’t bother her much. They can frame it however they want, to those on the outside looking in, but she knows the truth of it, the truth of what they are to each other. Frank does, too. They’re the only ones who matter.

A staffer hands her flowers during the car ride there; predominantly daises and laurels, the latter she can’t help but roll her eyes at with a grin. It’s for optics, more than anything; a pretty picture, the virtuous, virginal first daughter clad all in baby blue, holding flowers.

She knows he’ll appreciate them, though. Knows they’ll mean something.

She leaves the cameras behind at the hospital entrance, Nate and Asher and Bonnie holding them off as a few overeager nurses sweep her up, escorting her down a hallway, before stopping at a room near the end. Her detail takes their posts outside and down the hallway, with Bonnie stationed at the door, and it’s only then that she swallows, collecting herself and stepping inside, knuckles going white around her flower bouquet. He’s sitting up in bed when she enters, looks like he’s expecting her; she’s sure they told him she was coming, but his eyes light up nonetheless, a smile unfolding onto his lips, not at all hesitant.

“Hey,” Frank greets, and she almost has to laugh at the sight of him all laid up in a hospital gown, so radically different from his usual suit and sunglasses macho-man shtick.

She smiles back, holding the flowers close to her chest, lingering near the door. She feels self-conscious; nervous, for reasons she’s going to pretend she can’t pin down. “Hi.”

“Those for me?” he asks, nodding down at the flowers, amused.

Laurel scoffs. “No, I, uh, just carry laurels with me everywhere I go. It’s kinda my new thing.”

She crosses the room, finally, laying down the bouquet on his bedside table. She can feel his eyes on her face, almost as if he were touching her. “They told me you were comin’. Your dad stopped by yesterday.”

She takes a seat in the chair beside the bed. “Guess I’m kind of an underwhelming second act then.”

“Nah,” he replies, easily. “You’re the one I really wanted to see.”

God, it isn’t fair. He can’t just _say_ things like that, so honest, sincere, like he really means them; she refuses to take the blame for the way her chest flutters right then, like a butterfly that’s gotten trapped in her lungs and is now trying to beat its way out, a fizzy, almost disorienting sort of weightlessness boiling in her stomach. And she knows he _does_ mean them – that’s the worst thing.

The best thing.

“You…” She drifts off, straightening her back. “How’re you feeling?”

“Can’t complain. They got me on some good shit, I gotta say. Doc said I should be outta here in a week maybe, back to work in two.”

She smiles, casting her eyes down at her hands, folded primly in her lap. “Good. I know… we’ve all missed you. Asher, especially.” _Me._

He snorts. “Glad to hear Doucheface is managing on his own.”

She laughs; that’s become Frank’s not-so-affectionate pet name for Asher as of late, which, from what she’s heard, has caught on with the other agents, much to Asher’s chagrin.

“Bonnie’s whipped him into shape pretty well.”

Something dances behind Frank’s eyes; amusement, at a joke she’s apparently on the outs of. “Yeah, I bet she did.” He pauses, leaning back slightly and looking at her closely, not endeavoring to be discreet or sly in the slightest, just staring outright, shameless. “She told me you were worried about me. Real worried.”

She tries to play it casual, let the words hit her and bounce off, though Laurel has the sense she fails, for the most part. “Of course I was. You-” There’s strain in her voice, when she continues, vocal cords taut. She can’t help but wonder how much Bonnie told him. She suspects it was probably more than he’s letting on. “You could’ve died, why wouldn’t I worry?”

He sounds sad, mournful. Resigned, in a way she’s never seem him before. “You can’t be doin’ that, Laurel.”

There’s no force behind his words, no bite, just something like faint disappointment. Even so, she blinks. “What-”

“You know how farmers don’t name their animals, so they don’t get attached before they gotta lead ‘em to the slaughterhouse?” he asks, and Laurel scowls. “That’s how I gotta be for you. It’s my job to keep you safe. If I die doin’ it, that’s just how it goes. So don’t-” He cuts himself off. “Don’t go worryin’ about me. I’m not worth it.”

“You’re not-” She scoffs, looking at him like he’s gone crazy – as if she could ever stop caring, deem him replaceable and toss him aside after they’ve already opened a door between them, crossed that Rubicon, passed that point of no return. Laurel shakes her head in disbelief. “Don’t compare yourself to an animal, you’re… you’re my friend.”

 _Friend._ Not what they should be. It’s strictly off-limits for him to be her friend, she knows, but they passed that exit ages ago and there’s no off-ramp in sight now, no reversing course. Even if there was a way to do that, even if there was any going back now, she’s not sure either one of them would.

His eyes soften, hazy blue, a grin worming its way onto his lips, but there’s meaning behind it. It’s small and subdued, measured. “I know.”

The quiet rises up, settles over them easily, doesn’t bring any particular burden to fill it. After a while, she crosses her legs, resting her back against the chair, letting the air out of her lungs smoothly like releasing a drag of a cigarette.

“They’re calling you a hero, y’know,” she remarks, glancing up at the television, which is playing CNN on mute, a roundtable of talking heads carrying on about the latest breaking news from the Hill.

“Wouldn’t really say catching a bullet in the lung makes me much of a hero.”

“It does if you’re doing it for the president.”

“That wouldn’t be any kinda way to go,” Frank says, suddenly serious, eyes boring into hers so intensely it makes her shift in her seat, press her bare thighs together. “If I’m dyin’ for anybody around here, it’s you.”

He can’t say stuff like that. He can’t just come out and _say_ these kinds of things out of nowhere – and she suspects he wouldn’t, normally, if he weren’t being pumped full of morphine and God knows what else, but he’s said it now, and there’s no going back, and all she can do is sit there, struck speechless, chest as tight as her throat. She doesn’t know what to say to that. She doesn’t think the words exist to reply with any measure of coherency, and so again she takes the coward’s way out, doesn’t reply at all for a long while.

“I don’t want you dying for me,” she murmurs, finally. “Or my father. Or any of us. We’re not…” She pauses, and it’s a pause with weight. The thought of losing him terrifies her to her bones, shoots icicles into her blood. “We’re not worth it. You said you’re not worth worrying about, but us-” She swallows. “We’re not worth dying for. Just trust me.”

“Nobody’s dyin’ around here,” he tells her, nonchalant as anything, as if they aren’t discussing his hypothetical demise at all. “It’ll take more ‘n one stray bullet to take me out anyway.”

The words seem to release some invisible stop, and the tension floods out of the room all at once, lightening the air. She flushes, laughing quietly. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s true.”

They talk for a while longer – about nothing, really, but that’s the thing with Frank: she feels _free_ to talk about nothing, about trivial, unimportant things, and he never gives her any indication she’s boring him. She feels free, with him, free in a way she’s never been with Kan, Nessa, anyone in her life except maybe Michaela. She feels seen. Understood.

She feels a whole host of other things, too. But she’s not going to dignify any of those things by giving them a name.

“I should go,” Laurel states, suddenly, during a lull in their conversation. “I’m having brunch with a donor from the foundation. Just another… rich asshole who needs gratifying.”

His eyes dance. “So? Screw ‘em. Stay here and have brunch. They got some seriously good chocolate pudding.”

“Next time,” she says, laughing lightly as she rises to stand, as reluctant to leave as she is inexplicably eager. “I’ll come visit again. Soon.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. I’ll be back followin’ you around 24/7 soon enough. ‘Sides,” he tells her, voice dropping low in his throat, raspy. There’s something in his eyes; she can’t look too close, can’t give it a name either. She wouldn’t dare – even if she knows full well what it is, even if she knows that that same look is probably reflected in her own eyes. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, don’t it?”

She needs to shut this down. Preferably sooner rather than later. She’s acutely aware of how often they flirt, how this thing between them, whatever it is, has the potential to spiral out of control into something even less appropriate than whatever it is they have going now. She needs to shut it down and she will, one of these days. Really, she will.

Just… not today. He took a bullet in the chest for her father. She reasons it’s the least she can do.

Laurel slips out the door, having the willpower at least to forsake any long last looks, and after she shuts it quietly behind her, she lets out a breath. It must be more audible than she realizes, because Bonnie, stationed against the wall next to her, glances over, eyes narrowed.

She sees; Laurel is sure she must. She’d have to be blind not to. However, all she asks is: “Ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Laurel breathes, grateful for her discretion, swallowing the feelings rising in her throat and raising her chin.

She takes a step forward, down the hall, but perplexingly enough, Bonnie doesn’t make a move to follow. Laurel turns, brow furrowed, and finds the other woman looking at her, with that flat, unnerving stare of hers, that stare which cuts past her outsides, trims the fat off her bones, leaves her wide open and plain and naked. She feels pinned down before her, a frog on a dissecting pan, and fidgets, shifting her weight from one leg to another.

Her voice is smaller than she’d like it to be, when she finally finds it. “Is something wrong?”

“Can I be frank with you?” Bonnie deadpans, taking a step toward her, small in stature but somehow ferocious, infinitely intimidating.

She cringes, inwardly. “Why does everyone keep saying tha-”

“We appreciate your concern for Frank. Really, we do. The entire Service does,” she continues, cutting her off, nothing haughty about her words. “Most of the people we protect couldn’t care less whether we live or die. We’re just bodies to them. So, I’m glad you care about him.” She pauses. Laurel fidgets once more. “But I’m worried it’s crossed a line.”

Laurel blinks. “Excuse me?”

“I see the way you look at him. And more importantly, I see the way he looks at you. He cares about you, and I don’t think it’s at a strictly professional level, anymore. With all due respect, that worries me.”

“There’s… nothing going on between Frank and I-” she starts, quite defensive for someone asserting that she has absolutely nothing to be defensive _about_.

Bonnie keeps going, heedless of her words. “I don’t mean to overstep my bounds. But there’s a reason we don’t develop personal friendships with our protectees, and definitely nothing more than friendships. If we mix business and pleasure, do favors beyond our duties, it can only ever end badly. I understand that you care about him.” She purses her lips tightly, in that way that makes her whole face look sour. “But I would advise you not to do anything more than that.”

She leaves her with that, holding up her sleeve and speaking into her radio, setting the rest of her detail into motion. All Laurel can do is stand there in the middle of the hallway, frozen stiff, mouth agape, looking just as much a fool as she feels.

There’s nothing going on between them. That part hadn’t been a lie, not technically – yet somehow it also feels like it couldn’t possibly be further from the truth. 


	5. May

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Or, the chapter I think you've all been waiting for....
> 
> In case you're curious, like 90 percent of the deets about Camp David (including the Laurel Lodge) are real. For once, I sort of know what I'm talkin about. AND, finally, you may have noticed this thing now has 9 chapters... because I fucked up and miscounted on my outline somehow. So. More to love.

The moment their helicopter touches down in the backwoods of Maryland, she’s supremely aware that this is fifty shades of a colossal mistake.

“I got it,” Frank says as they alight, striding up and taking hold of her bag for her, flashing her a grin that verges on downright wicked. Their hands brush when he does, a current passing through her, and – yep.

This is without a doubt a fuck-up for the ages. One for the goddamn history books.

It’s her own fault, really, she ponders as they stroll past a wooden sign with the words _Camp David_ carved into it in large white lettering. She hadn’t refused when her father had insisted she get a week away from the city – for her mental health after the shooting, he’d reasoned, all puffed-up and pleased with himself like he was bestowing on her some especially generous favor, when really she knows he couldn’t give less of a shit about _anyone’s_ mental health, let alone hers.

She’d negotiated minimal security. Frank, of course, had graciously volunteered himself. Refusing and insisting on someone else might’ve aroused suspicion. Possibly even more suspicion than she’s already aroused.

She needs to stop using that word. _Aroused_.

So. It was a series of unfortunate events, more than anything; the majority of which weren’t her fault. But she still didn’t say _no_. She could blame the universe, blame the fates and karma and any god inhabiting the heavens, but really, when it comes down to it, she’s on a compound in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, with nobody but Frank and the trees for company, and it’s her fault – and she can’t deny she isn’t secretly thrilled.

This is different than their ill-advised midnight sojourn to Philadelphia. They’re well and truly alone here, isolated and insulated from the prying eyes of the world. She’s trying not to think of the implications of that. Trying not to think about all the things that _could_ happen.

She knows Frank is, though. She can see in his eyes that he’s very obviously _not_ trying not to.

They meet the camp’s commanding officer, its only permanent resident, and after dropping off her bag he takes them on a tour of the retreat, driving them around on a golf cart. It’s blissfully quiet, that’s the first thing she notices; quiet in a way she never seems to be able to find in D.C., even when she’s technically in the silence. They’re bathed only in birdsong and sunlight, here. The mountain air feels markedly clearer too, fresh and morning-crisp, like she can finally catch her breath for the first time in months.

There’re only cabins, for the most part, dotted about and built to house visiting dignitaries and world leaders and other guests of import. A fitness center. A chapel, on the off chance a member of the first family is feeling particularly pious. An area for staff. The whole place is off-limits to the press, off-limits to pretty much everyone.

They end their tour in front of a seemingly unremarkable lodge some ways downhill from the president’s cabin; immaculately landscaped and well maintained, all faded grey-green siding with a stone path leading to the front door. The commanding officer leads them to that front door; tall, imposing mahogany – and when they come to a stop and Laurel catches a glimpse of the word embroidered onto the doormat, she can’t help but grin.

“I thought I’d end the tour here just for you,” the man announces, cheeks flushed from the May heat; not sweltering, but enough to make all three of them perspire. “Here we are. The Laurel Lodge.”

She hums, glancing up at the building, tucked away in the trees. A staffer had told her about this place. It’s not a lodge that houses anyone; it holds official meetings and luncheons and summits, mostly, has an office for the president, a conference room. It’s larger than the other cabins; simple, blending into the nature around it, yet it’s light years more welcoming than her usual stately white prison, bearing her name in a serendipitous twist of fate.

It does suit her, in some odd way.

“The Laurel Lodge,” she echoes softly, words carried off by the breeze so fast she doubts Frank or the commanding officer even hears them.

The man dismisses himself, leaving the golf cart for their use, and the moment he’s gone Frank turns to her, glancing up at the building as well. He’s dressed in plainclothes, khaki shorts and a navy-blue polo, and she’d make fun of him for it if she weren’t so distracted by his arms, the bulging of his biceps where his shirt sleeves end, the pronounced vein she can see running down the span of one of them. It makes her shift, squeeze her thighs together, as if trying to stop up the flow of something inside her.

“Laurel Lodge, huh?” he remarks, giving her a wink. The movement strikes something in her chest, like her ribs are a harp and he has her wide open, plucking her strings with no effort at all. “Almost like it was made for you.”

_Like you were?_

The words bubble up in her chest. She has no idea where they come from, what dark, depraved, disobedient little corner of her brain produces them against her better judgement. She doesn’t say them out loud; she’s not that much of an idiot, but the thought of them alone – and how naturally it comes – is enough to jar her, and so she gulps, taking a step toward the golf cart, with the express purpose of putting some distance between them – if only for a moment.

“I’m gonna head back,” she announces. “Take a nap, I think.”

Maybe take a cold shower, too, while she’s at it.

 

~

 

There’s a summer storm brewing in the mountains. Something simmering in the sky.

The air feels heavy, charged and pressurized, jumping with sparks; the kind that makes her hairs stand on end, almost as if in anticipation. Laurel knows she isn’t imagining it as she steps outside to sunbathe by the pool in front of the cabin later that afternoon, the wind picking up and tossing her hair. It feels fittingly ominous, storm clouds rolling toward them on the horizon like a grey tide encroaching upon the shore; a harbinger of something.

Usually the Secret Service stays in a staff cabin, after their shifts are over. But there’s no one here watching, no one to judge, hold them to any norms or bind them by any rules, and so she tells Frank, as casually as she can manage, that he might as well just stay in the cabin with her; there are four bedrooms. It has more than enough space. He should stay close. Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer.

Frank is neither friend nor enemy, though. He’s something else entirely.

It’s her second mistake, allowing him that sort of proximity. She can’t seem to help herself; she’s careening wildly, spiraling out of control, as self-destructive as that dumbass proverbial moth to a flame. This trip is all one colossal mistake comprised of many smaller mistakes that’ve all snowballed together and keep rolling down that hill, picking up snow, growing, gaining traction.

The bikini is her third mistake. To be honest, she knew that when she packed it.

It’s white. Simple. Unadorned. Tied at her back and hips, cupping her breasts and ass snugly. Frank has his sunglasses on as they venture outside, and she can feel his eyes on her like always, burning into her, taking her in like a feast of exposed skin. It’s his job to watch her, that may be true.

Some chore that must be right about now.

She plods her way across the grey flagstone pool deck, towel in hand, and settles herself down onto one of the poolside chaise lounges with a sigh, sinking back into the cushion. After a while, she sits up and sets about massaging sunblock into her skin, movements languid, leisurely in a way that implies a degree of showmanship, though she tells herself that it’s because she’s fair-skimmed, that without sunblock she’ll fry to a crisp – which is true, conditionally. Even if sunblock is a moot point right now, before a thunderstorm.

Maybe this is all a show, put on for his benefit – the bikini, the sunbathing, the decadent sway of her hips when she walks, ever so slightly exaggerated. Maybe she’s doing it unconsciously. But she _is_ conscious of it, overwhelmingly so; every movement precise and planned. She’s sharply cognizant of his gaze on her skin, burning her brighter red than any sun ever could, scalding her, from his place on the lounge chair only feet away.

But she has her own sunglasses on too, now. She’s leveled the playing field. She can watch him right back, without him knowing – although she thinks Frank does. He does know; he’s perceptive, like her. This all feels like a silent game of cat and mouse, dancing around each other, waiting to see who’ll be the first to trip up, give in.

“Need help?” he asks, suddenly, grinding her reverie to a violent halt. She must look confused, because he clarifies. “Your back.”

He’s not even trying to be subtle, at this point. Laurel half-wants to laugh.

He’s playing right into her hands. Or maybe she’s playing right into his.

“No,” she breathes, dismissive, and squirts a generous amount of lotion into her hand, making a show of reaching behind to rub it into her back, though it’s awkward and more difficult than she anticipates, and she almost wrenches her shoulder out of its socket to prove some kind of point. “I think I got it.”

He smirks, rubbing his palms together. Frank seems to think there’s some joke in all this, one he isn’t telling, but he keeps his mouth shut, for once. They settle into the silence for a while, and it’s mostly comfortable, but Frank’s silence always feels a bit like a loaded gun, disconcerting, unpredictable. The sharp, fresh aroma of ozone is layering the air, foretelling an oncoming storm, but it’s far enough in the distance that Laurel decides to chance a dip in the pool, and so she stands, approaching the water, dangling her legs over the side, before pushing off and sinking into it.

“Storm’s brewing,” Frank calls out as she wades toward the deep end, removing her sunglasses and ducking underwater for a moment before resurfacing. “Need sun to sunbathe.”

She shrugs and pushes her wet hair back out of her eyes. “I’ll swim then.”

“During a thunderstorm? You got some kinda death wish?”

Probably. But she doesn’t tell him that. There’s a jitteriness in her bones, that perilous drop in her stomach she always feels before a thunderstorm; the urge to flee, run with the wind at her back, similar to the way she feels whenever she’s around him. She’s fleeing one storm, running head-on into another. She’ll wait until the last minute to get out of the water before lightning comes raining down from above. Maybe she won’t move fast enough.

Maybe she won’t move at all.

“You should get in,” she calls back, voice rippling across the pool, sharp and certain. She stands, body rising from the water, droplets of it racing down her sides, her décolletage, her breasts, tightly contained in her bikini top. Rising. Wanting. All of her wanting. “The water’s fine.”

That finally gets him to take off his sunglasses. He knows what she’s asking, what she’s inviting him to do. The worst part is, she barely regrets the words once they leave her mouth; there’s a flicker of panic which darts across her skin, like the jolt of catching herself before a fall, but it evaporates quickly, picked up and carried off by the wind, and she knows what she wants. And she knows what _he_ wants. There’s every reason to deny themselves this. There’s every reason _not_ to.

Her feet are touching the bottom. Yet Laurel has the distinct sense, all at once, that she’s in over her head here.

There’s a note of caution in his voice, but not reluctance, by any stretch. “Laurel…”

She makes her way over to the side of the pool, folding her arms up on the stone surface, gazing at him. She feels insane. She’s never been so forward. So _stupid_.

“Come on,” she tells him, feigning nonchalance, as if she’s making a totally mundane request. As if this is nothing at all, when her heart is beating so fast it feels like it could bash her chest in at any second now. “An assassin could… come out of the woods. You can’t protect me if you’re all the way over there.”

She seems, for once, to have genuinely caught him off guard, and it’s a satisfying sight. “Don’t have swim trunks.”

“You have shorts.”

He stands, makes his way over to her, but doesn’t make a move to get in. “You know this ain’t a good idea.”

“What?” She cocks her head to one side. This time, it’s innocence she feigns. “Can’t swim?”

Frank scoffs. “Very funny.”

“Come on.” Coaxing him, again. Gentle, persistent. “Come in.”

There’s a shift in the set of his jaw, right then. His eyes darken. “What is it you want, Laurel?”

Laurel pauses. She wonders if this is an out he’s giving her, one last chance to reverse this course of action before it’s too late, though she knows in her heart it’s already too late, light years past the point which could once have been considered _too late_. Her whole body is humming with want, rumbling like the distant thunder above, beginning between her legs and creeping ever upward. There’s a change in atmospheric pressure, all at once; a sudden drop or surge, or maybe both, and she doesn’t think it’s imagined. She doesn’t think it’s the storm that causes it.

She feels like a siren clinging to a rock, luring a mortal to his doom. Only this is her doom, too. This is a two-way street.

“You’re my bodyguard. Do… what you do best,” she releases the words on a breath, thin and reedy as a sigh, but steady. “Guard my body.”

He pauses. For a moment, she’s almost certain he’s going to say no, shut this whole thing down – and probably he should; he has a thousand reasons to. She can feel herself spiraling, slipping. Willpower feels like a distant dream. She’s sopping wet and it isn’t from the pool water. She’s sweating all over and it isn’t from the heat.

She’s almost certain he’s going to say no. And then, without warning, he’s tugging his shirt over his head, tugging off his shorts, discarding the pistol in his pocket and his earpiece, and approaching.

He doesn’t say a word as he descends the steps and wades in the water, slowly, each move calculated yet cavalier; not at all like a predator leaping on its prey, ready to devour, hasty in its hunger. He’s so calm, as calm as the knowing blues of his irises, tracking her, watching her, wordless. He’s every bit as built as she’d expected him to be, pecs toned, abdomen chiseled, sculpted like a damn Adonis in his boxers, and he knows it, knows what he’s doing to her; that much is clear. She suspects he always does.

He’s all hard lines, sharp planes, jagged angles, and he’s tall but not a great deal taller than her, and still he seems enormous, looming. She doesn’t tremble. Doesn’t quiver. Doesn’t so much as break eye contact for half a second. She watches his every step, chin raised, because if this is a game of cat and mouse _he’s_ the mouse and she’s determined to be the cat, and she has him right in her crosshairs, lined up where she wants him.

And then he’s before her, body pressing against hers, mere inches apart in the middle of the pool, the cicada song pouring over them in droves. And suddenly she’s no longer sure who’s the cat and who’s the mouse at all. Suddenly it doesn’t matter.

She’s not going to tremble. She’s _not_. She can’t think with him so close, peering down at her as if waiting for her to initiate, make the first move, just staring. Not speaking. If he expects her to be able to speak, he’s going to be waiting one hell of a long time, because she can’t even breathe. Can’t think – and then.

Then, she sees it.

She glances down, and her eyes fall on a small, vaguely circular pink scar on his chest, a few inches below his left breast – the gunshot wound. Healed, for the most part, yet still starkly visible; a clean entry, from what she can tell, but an especially deadly location. He’s lucky to have survived it. It makes guilt well up inside her like a plume of magma, hot and thick and knotting in her chest, until she comes crashing back down to earth and all she can _do_ is think.

It’s her fault, even if it isn’t. Or wasn’t. It _feels_ like it was. His duty is to her, her family, and not a single fucking one of them warrants that sort of sacrifice. Good men don’t give their lives for bad men in any sort of just world.

She reaches out slowly, pressing her fingers against it, tracing the scar gingerly, almost as though scared she might hurt him, reopen it somehow. She can feel his gaze on her face, that darkness giving way to tenderness like sunlight breaking through storm clouds, and she tells herself she’s not trembling, faintly, but it’s a lie; a bold-faced lie. Frank doesn’t stiffen or flinch, when she touches him, caressing that mark of cruelty done to him. His duty. His job. That’s what he’d called it, like it wasn’t a big deal – but it was and they both know it.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, avoiding his eyes, swallowing thickly. She drops down into the water, all of a sudden, lowering herself to be at eye-level with the wound, and slowly, very slowly, presses her lips to his skin where her fingers had been, nothing more than a brief whisper-touch. Something of a healing anointment. “I-”

Strong hands encircling her forearms, then. Dragging her up. Dragging her close.

“Come up here,” is all he rasps, and then he’s sealing his mouth over hers, stealing away her apologies, swallowing them down, because there’s nothing for him to forgive her. There never was.

Frank kisses like she’d imagined he would; hot and hard, scratchy, open-mouthed and passionate but not violently so, his hands groping at her slippery skin to find purchase and tug her hard against him, like he can’t seem to get her quite close enough. She melts in it, into _him_ , her whole body thrumming, head pounding like her heart has taken up residence there instead, and when he reaches up, pulling at the tie binding her bikini top to her body until it comes loose and goes crumpling forward, she moans into his mouth, full and throaty.

“What is it you want?” he asks again, after he pulls back, a smirk teasing at his lips, his hand cupping her ass. Because she doesn’t want him to _guard her body_ ; that was a lie and they both know it, some lame fucking euphemism. He wants her to say it, admit it – admit when she wants, what she’s wanted for months, perhaps even since the night they met.

Well. There’s no _perhaps_ in this equation. There was never a shred of doubt about that.

A whimper comes loose from her throat, before she can stop it. “Frank-”

“Say it.”

His voice; not hard or gruff. Soft. Coaxing, the way she’d coaxed him into the water, coaxed him overboard and onto the rocky cliffside below, and now they’re down here, drowning together, drowning in each other. He gave her what she wanted. Now, it’s time for her to reciprocate.

And it only takes one word.

“You.”

He surges forward the instant the word leaves her mouth, tearing at her bikini, and it takes hardly thirty seconds for him to have her nude, flinging her swimsuit aside as if the simple fact of its existence has somehow grievously offended him. The discarded thing goes drifting across the water, and before she can so much as breathe out a laugh he’s urging her backwards toward the shallow end, pressing her up against the side of the pool and curling her thin legs around him. She’s weightless in the water when he hoists her up, pressing her slick, supple body flush against his chest and reaching up, rolling one of her nipples between his thumb and forefinger.

She moans, and the sound rises up into the trees and dissipates like smoke on the wind. Laurel wonders, with a perverse little jolt in her belly, what would happen if someone were to discover them like this.

“Fuck,” he groans, as he slips a hand between her thighs and presses one thick finger inside her. She’s drenched, embarrassingly so. She’s been wet ever since she stepped outside, grew wetter every second he watched her, and now he has her, quite literally, in the palm of his hand, cupping her mound, grinding the heel of his hand against her swollen clit, getting her wetter still. She rocks her hips, whining. “You’re fucking _soaked_.”

She pants out a laugh against his lips. “Well, we _are_ in a pool.”

She’s dimly aware of the fact that he’s still in his boxers, and she simply won’t stand for such a glaring disparity in clothing, so she tugs at his waistband, yanking them down and taking his cock in hand, tugging it toward her; long, thick, as big as she’d envisioned – because yes, she _had_ thought about it. She’s not above that; she’s only human. He gulps, Adam’s apple bobbing, and Laurel gives him something of a triumphant grin, like he’s proven her point.

“You’re no saint either,” she teases against his throat, grazing her teeth across the stubble there.

“Never said I was,” he chuckles, teasing a finger along the seam of her cunt and applying the faintest pressure to her clit, engorged and wanting. Her whole body feels like it’s rising toward him, into his heat, like dough. “Ain’t that who you’re supposed to be? Saint Laurel?”

“Fuck sainthood,” is her very eloquent response, because, well, _fuck sainthood_. Fuck any and every one of the dubiously existent deities looking down on her. Especially fuck virtuous and virginal and every other archaic, sexist qualifier the tabloids have decided to attach to her. She wants dirty and wrong and _real_. And right now, she really just wants-

“Fuck me.”

His grin is devilish when he dives back down to the banquet of her neck, humming against her skin. “Condom.”

They don’t have one. The thought had barely even occurred to her; this is stupid enough as it is, and the last thing she needs is the headline _Pregnant President’s Daughter_ following her around for the next nine months. At least one of them has ample presence of mind.

Luckily-

“IUD,” she blurts out, a ragged groan following the words as he places his cock at her entrance, brushing it against her clit. She writhes, resting one arm back on the ledge, swiveling her hips in an awkward, failed attempt to take him inside her, to get him to do _something_. “God – just-”

He could make her beg. He’s _Frank_ , after all; no doubt he considers it, but in the end he chooses not to. He seems fed up with foreplay, with waiting, when it feels like they’ve waited eons already, and so instead he wraps an arm around her, places the other at her hip, and guides himself into her in one slow stroke, every inch of it deliberate, masterful. Her whole body seizes up at the sensation – because he’s huge, he feels fucking _enormous_ , filling her almost to the point of pain but not quite. There’s so much of him, inside and outside of her. She feels like she’s been swallowed up. Taken over. She feels so small, comparatively tiny, as light as a doll, but if he’s a giant he’s a gentle one, reaching down in the space between them and pawing at her clit, cooing in her ear, unspooling the tension in her sinews until she’s as wide open and fluid as the water surrounding them.

“ _Frank_.” His name comes out on a moan. It feels so natural, moaning his name, like it’s meant to be moaned, meant for _her_ to moan. “Fuck… _oh_ -”

She’s burning. The water feels like flowing lava around them, thick and scalding. The edges of her world are blurred, surreal, everything going soft focus. The storm is still rolling in, the wind picking up, and it feels like it echoes the pace of the build inside her, between her legs; that blissful pressure, swelling, growing. She was kindling and he was a match, and she was always this ready to go up in flames; it hadn’t even taken much. It’d just taken the right person.

Just him.

They shouldn’t be doing this. Somehow that only makes her want him more, and it’s cliché, yearning for the forbidden, the _good little rich girl_ and the _bad boy_ , but she long ago accepted the fact that she’s a horrible cliché, so really, this isn’t a striking revelation. She can feel her cunt starting to clench around his cock, trembling, pulling him deeper, and she tightens her legs around him accordingly, squeezing her thighs together, listening to him moan at the increased tightness around him. He leans down, closing his lips around her left nipple, sucking, and she lets herself lean back against the side of the pool, providing him a better angle and luxuriating in his attentions on her tits. He massages them until they ache with a pleasant dullness, that same ache which pulses like an increasingly frantic heartbeat between her legs.

He’s not fucking her particularly hard or fast; he wants to draw this out. He doesn’t equate sexual prowess to how fast he can get her off, that much is clear.

He wants to make this last. To make _her_ last.

They move in sync, flowing together with the water guiding them, and it’s slippery, splashy, a little messy and sometimes clumsy and not altogether finessed, but somehow it feels better than perfect, her legs hooked around him, his cock filling her like she was carved out for him to fit inside her. They find a rhythm with almost no effort at all, a gentle, unhurried rocking that eventually has Laurel tightening and yet simultaneously loosening, her cunt burning, tits begging for the attention of his hands once more. He can’t seem to touch her enough. Every inch of her skin craves the press of every inch of his.

She’s never felt like this. Like she’s flying and sinking all at once. Like she’s in over her head yet somehow still breathing. She feels remarkably centered, relaxed, even as she reaches down, circling her clit with her fingers, feeling the stretch of her cunt where he’s buried inside her, her body opening for him. Fingers in her hair. Mouth on her neck. Cock sheathed inside her like he’s content to remain there forever.

She wouldn’t mind that, really.

She buries her face into his shoulder when she comes, muffling her cries against his skin, coiling herself around him. White fireworks burst behind her eyelids. All that light, the rumble of thunder in the distance. The scent of the mountain air mixed with the thickness of ozone and the faint smell of chlorine. The feeling of erotic fullness, him inside her. The look in his eyes. It’s all too much.

Normally when she comes she leaves her body, loses all awareness of her surroundings, yet this time she feels so harshly, painfully _present_ in her own skin it’s almost too much to stand, too overwhelming. Sex, for her, has almost always been escapism – but that’s not what this is, now. There’s nothing she wants to escape.

Nothing at all.

They stay where they are, after he’s come too, as the sky goes dark, the light vanishing overhead. He’s still inside her, cock going soft, body against hers, and they’re both sweaty yet unable to discern what is sweat and what is pool water, what is her body and what is his. Frank dusts kisses along her jawline, nuzzles the hollow of her throat, and she gives a little hum of contentment, the boundaries between them going fuzzy until she’s no longer sure they exist at all.

If he’s a storm, this is the eye of it; the momentary quiet of the aftermath, when she knows there’s still so much more to come.

Rolling thunder in the distance brings her back to reality – or as much of a reality as any of this can be, because it all still feels like a beautiful, hazy lucid dream. A drop of rain hits her square between the eyes with a _plop_ , and they both laugh.

“We should get inside,” he drawls, glancing up at the churning sky, the heavy clouds swollen with rain.

She laughs again, imagining lightning crackling down from that sky, heading straight for them in the water, some angry god striking them down. They’d find them like this, still tangled, him still inside her, like those plaster casts of lovers’ final embraces at Pompeii, buried beneath all the rubble and ash for centuries and unable to be separated. It’s morbid, but it sends a shiver of a thrill up her spine. She’d like to see that angry god try.

Laurel says nothing. She just nods, taking his hand and leading him up onto the terrace, naked as the day she was born, and shameless, and _free_.

 

~

 

Frank builds them a fire in the living room fireplace while she combs out the damp tangles in her hair, and after that they drag pillows and mothballed blankets and old quilts from every bedroom in the cabin to pile on the carpet before it, building up a sort of nest.

It’s rustic, the presidential cabin. Modest. There seems to be a permanent layer of dust on everything, though she’s sure it was cleaned before her arrival. But it’s comfortable and it’s secluded, and it’s more than enough for the two of them.

She dresses herself in a robe, which lasts all of five minutes before Frank pulls her down and peels it right back off her, spreading her out on the floor and fucking into her as the fire roars beside them. The firelight licks at his skin, painting him with autumnal streaks of deep red and gold as he moves over her, and when she places a hand on his cheek and looks deep into his eyes, it strikes her, all at once, how beautiful he really is.

She’s lived in the lap of luxury all her life. And yet she’s never known paradise like this.

He pulls her against his chest after they’re both sweaty and spent, for the second or third or maybe fourth time. She’s lost count. Not that she really had the mental bandwidth to count with any measure of accuracy in the first place. There’s something steady and safe about Frank’s arms, as sturdy as a thousand-year-old fortress around her. She won’t deny it; she’s been ill at ease ever since the shooting. The nightmares have started up again. But his locking embrace quells those thoughts just a little, makes everything go calm and quiet behind her eyes.

She wonders what this is, between them. She’s almost afraid putting a label on it will scare it away. Destroy it, somehow.

“Gonna have to tell someone to clean the pool,” Frank remarks with a wry grin, and she scoffs, rolling over and resting her chin on his abdomen. “What? I’m tryin’ to be considerate, case your pops feels the call of the wild and comes up here, decides to take a dip.”

“He doesn’t like this place. Says it’s a dump,” she sneers under her breath, mood souring at the mention of him. “He’d rather fly down to his country club in Palm Beach and spend all weekend out on the golf course pretending his swing doesn’t suck ass. There’s nothing to do up here except-”

“Fuck in the pool?” he finishes for her, and Laurel laughs.

“I was gonna say stare at trees. But that works too.”

“We can do some tree starin’, if that’s what you’re into. Although, if I got you to look at…” He drifts off, the fire flickering in his eyes which are already warm with affection, warming them further, his dilated pupils like glowing black coals in the shadows. “Why in the hell would I wanna look at trees?”

Laurel flushes, and it isn’t entirely from the heat of the flames beside them, crackling and popping as they gnaw away at a log. “Flattery will get you _nowhere_ , Agent Delfino.”

“It ain’t flattery if I mean it,” he tells her, voice soft, sincere. He’s doing that thing he always does, again; says things like he really, truly, beyond a shred of doubt, honest-to-God means them. He’s so genuine it’s borderline discomforting, sometimes. “Enough ‘a that, though. Tell me something. A secret.”

Laurel blinks. “Uh, what?”

“A secret,” he repeats. “Something no one else knows.”

“What, are you a Russian spy or something?” she asks, mock-seriously. “Worming your way into my bed and trying to extract state secrets from me?”

That earns a laugh from him. “My last name sound Russian to you?”

Laurel hesitates. She guesses she should’ve seen this coming; she’s always despised pillow talk, but there’s something about Frank that makes it easy, flowing as freely as water, no forced, tight-jawed laughs or simpering smiles or long awkward pauses. Still, she balks.

“You first,” she tells him, finally, the words conspiratorial, like whispering secrets in grade school through cupped hands. “A man like you’s got secrets. Tell me one of yours. Maybe… then I’ll think about mine.”

Frank, apparently, doesn’t need to think at all. “My secret? I’ve wanted you since the first night I saw you. Ever since then. Every day.”

She gives a huffing laugh. “That’s not very professional, lusting after your protectee.”

“Can you blame me? Look at you. The paps don’t know what they’re missin’ out on, not making you their cover story every damn day.”

“I’m glad they don’t,” she confesses. “I’m not photogenic. That’s why they call me the wallflower.”

“Nah,” he says with certainty, shaking his head. He shifts, pressing her down and propping himself up on an elbow over her, placing his lips on the spot where her pulse flutters at her neck. “You’re no wallflower. You’re the motherfuckin’ centerpiece.”

She shudders, and it’s a full-bodied shudder. She feels it down to her bones. “That’s not a secret, by the way. I knew.” She pauses. “Bonnie did, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Mmm,” she hums, as he drops back down beside her, laying his head on one of the dozen pillows they’d appropriated for their makeshift fireside camp. “She stopped me at the hospital when I visited you. Told me you had feelings for me. Told me… not to get involved with you. That it could only end badly.”

He grins cheekily. “You didn’t listen.”

“No,” she breathes, mischief in her eyes. “I’m no good at doing what I’m told.”

“Boy am I glad that’s the case.” He kisses her for a moment, long and languorous, before pulling away. “But, hey, shitty or not, that’s my secret. Your turn.”

“Mmm.” She inhales, savoring the heat from the fire as it scatters across her skin, seeps into her pores. “You want a real secret or… a bullshit secret, like the one you just gave me?”

He laughs, throwing his head back and exposing the line of his throat. “How ‘bout this; I’ll take any secret you wanna give me, at this rate.”

She pauses. She’s thinking so loudly she wonders if Frank can hear her, somehow, and he looks as if he’s about to open his mouth when finally she beats him to the punch, the words rushing forward all at once.

“I was kidnapped, when I was sixteen.”

All the oxygen goes out of the room. She swears the fire even dims, a little, and the grin goes tumbling from his lips, replaced with a look of shock he doesn’t have time to remember to conceal. She can’t say what drives her to tell him that; her own self-destructive impulse to fuck up every good thing she has going for her, maybe. Some sort of litmus test to see if he’ll bolt.

God, she’s shit at pillow talk. She really is.

She assumes Frank is about to do what most guys would do, in this situation: abort mission and head for the fucking hills because he’s stumbled upon a grenade of a girl, laden with thousands of pounds of baggage, emotional and otherwise. Kan hadn’t done that. But Kan is of a rare breed of guy, and Frank isn’t Kan, and even comparing Frank to Kan feels ridiculous, apples to oranges.

She isn’t expecting his eyes to soften. Isn’t expecting him to melt against the blanket, inch closer instead of inching away.

Isn’t expecting him to _stay._

His voice is quiet, raspy with tenderness when he finally speaks. “You were?”

She nods. “It was… enemies of my father, in Mexico. They took me across the border. Left me in a basement of this abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. They beat me. Broke my fingers. My arm. They wanted a ransom; a couple million, I think. And he wouldn’t pay. He left me to die. I don’t… I don’t think he even cared.”

She gulps, throat threatening to close up, but her voice is steady. _She_ feels steady, steadier than she usually does when she talks about this, and his hand is on his arm, anchoring her, stroking idly up and down. She feels stable. She almost feels _strong_ , somehow.

“It was two weeks before they found me. And then, after, he just… made it all go away. He covered it up. Bribed the cops to keep them quiet. He’d just been elected governor. If news got out, people started asking questions… His political career would be over. So. He took care of it. It was like it never happened – and it didn’t, I guess. Not to anyone but me. I wonder if that’s why he wants me close by, sometimes. To keep an eye on me. Make sure I’m not gonna lose my mind and crack, blab to the press.” She pauses, and it’s a heavy pause; a pause with weight. “A kidnapped daughter is a political liability. Like a bipolar ex-wife. But.” She clears her throat, finally meeting his eyes, mustering up something like a smile, though she thinks it comes out looking more like a grimace. “That’s another story, I guess.”

Frank doesn’t look like he knows what to say, where to begin – and she can’t say she blames him; whatever it was he was expecting, it sure as hell wasn’t this. Some charming, inoffensive anecdote about falling while climbing a tree at thirteen and getting her first broken bone, maybe. A brief tale of a torrid middle school affair, scabby knees on the playground or a beloved first pet or long, golden childhood afternoons spent wasting time, all drenched in sunlight and lens flare. Something sweet and safe and decidedly lacking in substance.

She never had any of that. She never got the quaint, idyllic bildungsroman, the quirky adolescent coming-of-age they write stories about. She came of age in a concrete pen fifty miles south of the border with blood in her mouth and a gun to her head, broken and battered and barely alive, and that’s who she is. She has no pretty, frivolous stories to tell him.

This is who she is. And there’s not a chance in hell he could ever want that girl. Maybe she isn’t even a girl. Not even whole. Some days, at best, she thinks she’s just pieces.

But the fear she’s expecting, the flight response… None of it ever comes. Frank just remains still, listening to the fire and the silence and the sound of her breathing, and he doesn’t look afraid, terrified of the bomb he’s just detonated, the shitstorm he’s ostensibly flown into.

No, he’s not afraid. Not of her. Not of what’s happened to her. Not of any of it. Somehow, deep inside, she thinks she’d known he wouldn’t be.

“Thank you,” is all he says, so soft, so understanding and patient she could cry. “For tellin’ me. Trustin’ me. I know it must hurt to talk about.”

“That was what I meant. The night at the inaugural ball,” she explains, solemnly. “When I said he’s a monster, that no one knows but me. I wasn’t just some… rich girl with daddy issues.” A smile, of all things, makes its way onto her lips. “I had a point.”

The air loses some of its weight, and they relax, together, a rubber band snapping after being stretched to its limits. It’s right about then that it truly hits her: he isn’t going to run, vacate her bed, shy away from the darkness of her past and move on to someone less broken. He’s still looking at her exactly like he was before she said any of this, with adoration, awe. Nothing has changed.

Everything has. Everything and nothing.

“Why don’t you do it?” he asks, suddenly, tucking an arm behind his head, like the idea has just struck him. “Go public? Tell the world? Nobody’d reelect a guy who left his kid for dead. You could take him down. Do one… primetime interview with Diane Sawyer and destroy that entire goddamn administration. Shit, Laurel.” He blinks, almost as if unable to comprehend the magnitude of his words, the power she holds in her hands; power she doesn’t think she was so acutely aware of, until tonight. “He oughta be fuckin’ terrified of you.”

“Yeah, well. He’s not,” she dismisses the thought, shrugging it off, though it feels like a seed has been planted, somewhere inside her, and she’s not completely opposed to the idea of letting it grow. She rests her head on his chest, sighing. “So. That’s my secret. Didn’t really know what you were getting yourself into, did you?”

“I never do, when it comes to you.”

She laughs, tension in her body easing, and Frank reaches up, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, caressing that shell of cartilage with something in the realm of fascination; amazement, at even the most miniscule and ordinary parts of her.

“Tell me something else,” he says, finally, voice low. His skin is copper, in the firelight. Hers is, too. They’ve been forged together, one in the same. She feels so much stronger than she ever has, here with Frank; not broken or damaged but blessedly whole, a certain pervasive sense of belonging that she’s never once felt with Kan.

She closes her eyes, lets him cup her cheek. “Like what?”

“Anything.” He pauses. “I don’t know. Somethin’ good.”

Laurel only has to think for a moment before it hits her.

She knows just the thing.

“Wait here.”

Frank shoots her a questioning look as she stands, disappearing into the master bedroom where she’d left her bag and rummaging through it until she reaches the bottom, fingers making contact with the piece of paper she’d stowed away there; on an impulse, only hours before leaving, on the off chance the subject came up. She returns to their lover’s cocoon of blankets and pillows and flops down on her stomach, handing it over, gnawing on her lower lip nervously as Frank squints to read it in the dim light.

It takes him a moment before he realizes what he’s holding.

“Hey, Middleton. You applied after all.” He looks over at her, pride gleaming in his eyes. “You got in.”

“Damn right I did,” she says, grinning. “Like you said. I’m the president’s kid. But I’m smart, too.” She swallows, lowering her eyes, sheepish. “I, uh… I did some research. It has a really good law school. And I liked the city. And…” She looks up at him, and she can’t explain the look on his face. All she knows is that she’s never been looked at like that before in her life. “I think I’m gonna accept.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Her grin grows wider. She’s full to bursting with happiness, all at once. Brimming with it. “I’ll need a detail, when I move to Philly. I know maybe it’s too much to ask, but… I’d like it, if you came with me.”

He’s upon her, swiftly, switching their positions, climbing atop her, kissing her so hard it leaves her head reeling. His smile, when he pulls back, is the brightest she thinks she’s ever seen.

“You kiddin’ me?” he rasps against her throat, giddy as a schoolboy as he lays his lips on hers. “There ain’t nowhere in the world you could go that I wouldn’t follow.”


	6. June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're still enjoying, leave me a lil comment or kudo ;P They motivate me to write and post faster.... wink wink.

“Laurel! This way, Laurel! Over here – hey!”

She’s assaulted by a shower of flashbulbs as soon as she steps outside the theater, burning spots into her vision and making her squint, holding up a hand to shield her eyes. There’s a barrier holding the photographers back, erected by theater staff in advance, but Frank and Bonnie and Nate and Asher press in close nonetheless, painfully aware of the lackluster effectiveness of rope lines in light of recent events.

Frank stays close. Closer than he needs to. Hand hovering over her arm. Rock of a body against hers. She’s certain it’s no accident.

She feels smothered by it all – the attention, the faces in the crowd, the camera flashes, which slice through the darkness like lightning – and it only eases once they’ve shuffled her into the waiting limousine and closed the door. Frank climbs in the back with her – because of course, why _would_ he want to make this any easier on her – Asher taking his place behind the wheel. Bonnie and Nate make their way to the car parked behind them, and once the engine roars to life and they set into motion, she finally starts to breathe again.

It hasn’t been a particularly awful night. The trip to New York had been Elena’s idea; some half-baked attempt to market themselves as a happy, cohesive family unit, look marginally less like the out-of-touch nouveau riche one-percenters there’s no denying they are. A bit of narrative control too, she suspects, after an unsavory article in _The Herald_ about one of her brothers’ undergraduate misadventures at Yale involving some less-than-legal substances and academic misconduct.

Family bonding time. Dinner and a night at the theater. Nessa and the brats had stayed behind. Laurel hadn’t been given a similar opportunity. But as far as events for the sake of appearances go, this one has been at least moderately tolerable, and when she sinks back into her seat with Frank beside her and relaxes, she’s blessedly migraine-free, safe within the confines of the limo as if in a womb.

Frank is sitting beside her. Frank is sitting much closer than he needs to; much closer than protocol dictates. Frank seems to delight in violating every protocol there is, really, and she’d worry about Asher noticing in the rearview mirror if he wasn’t so – well, _Asher_.

They drive through the city streets in silence. Yet it doesn’t feel like silence at all.

The words they aren’t saying are as loud as screams, all those things they _can’t_ say, here and now, bubbling up in their chests but continually bitten back. She can hear them perfectly well anyway, everything he’s longing to tell her; how beautiful she looks, how her dress fits her just right, in all the right places.

How he’d rip it off her and fuck her right here, right now, right on this seat, roll down the window and let every photog in the city snap pictures to their heart’s content if it wouldn’t set the entire country in a roar.

She shouldn’t be nearly as wet as she is, bare thighs sticky, panties long ago sullied as she sat in their private box, watched the show with dim interest, able only to think of what was coming tonight, with Kan off in Vermont visiting family and Frank very much _here_. Her dress is a rich celestial blue, the color of lapis lazuli. Nothing that oozes overt sex appeal; this was a _family night_ , after all. Tasteful jewel neck. Not too tight, but it’s no nun’s habit. It leaves her far from formless.

It’s like a subliminal message to him, consisting of only one word: _tonight_. And she knows he’s picked up on it. He reads her loud and clear.

It stops just above the knee, the hem slipping mutinously higher while she’s seated. She can feel his eyes gravitating toward her exposed legs, staring at them out of his periphery; he’s never _not_ staring at her, no matter what else might be competing for his attention. She shaved them baby smooth this morning – amongst other things. Felt herself throb and dampen as she’d brushed her fingers over her mound, the petal-soft folds just below, imagining his fingers there instead.

The seconds pass by like eternities. She can feel her pulse quicken, can feel it slither down her veins until it settles into her clit. She feels like one giant, pulsing mass, every inch of her skin coming alive, vibrating, like something inside her is trying to surge forth; her telltale heart underneath the floorboards, beating, beating, breaking itself free.

A brush of fingers across her skin, then. His hand on her knee.

It catches her off guard somehow, fantasy on a collision course with reality, and Laurel tenses, her head flying in his direction – because this is stupid, yes, what they’re doing is blatantly stupid and has been from the start, but this is venturing onto a new level of stupidity. Idiocy. Lunacy. Call it whatever you want; it’s still fucking _stupid_. Frank doesn’t react, just keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead, as cool and equanimous as ever, like this is something entirely routine, something he might do for any protectee he’s been assigned.

Her mouth is as dry as the Sahara. Down below, she’s anything but.

“Could you roll up the partition, please?”

Her voice is only half as steady as she’d like it to be, but apparently steady enough that Asher just nods, gives her an affirmative _Yes, ma’am_ without even bothering to look in the rearview mirror, and does as she says, the partition rising until it meets the roof of the car, insulating them from the driver’s compartment – and that’s stupid, too. She’s stupid to make it easier for them, here. For _him_.

Of course Frank takes that as permission to zero in. Because it sort of definitely was.

His hand slides higher, across the silk-smoothness of her skin, under her dress, sending goosebumps surging to the surface, rising into his touch. It’s something innate inside her, some Pavlovian response he triggers, but all at once she’s wet and throbbing, and when he finally slips his hand into her panties she can’t even put up so much as a weak front of resistance.

She gnaws on her lower lip, trying desperate not to squirm down onto his fingers, look even more pathetic and undignified than she already does. Her voice isn’t a moan but it’s verging on one, too close for comfort, and she stifles it, unable to be sure if the passenger cabin is soundproof or not and not particularly wanting to take the chance.

“Frank…”

“Somethin’ I can do for you?”

He barely even looks at her as he glides a finger across her clit; she’s soaked it already and she can barely summon the will to care, even though there’s a delicious niggle of shame chewing a hole in her stomach; the thought of how she must look from the outside, legs spread, flushed as red as a beet, getting fingered in the back of a limousine like a horny teenage girl after prom.

Her eyes slip closed, head falling back against the headrest. Somehow, she finds a way to grin. “You – _ah_ – you’re not… playing fair.”

A shrug is all she gets, apparently. “All’s fair in love and war, isn’t it?”

War. This isn’t a war that they’re fighting, here – not really. A battle, at most. A twisted little power play. He may or may not be winning.

And she’s sure as shit going to plead the Fifth on the love part.

His finger dips inside her, then pulls back just as swiftly, massaging her wetness up to her clit. She feels like she’s about to burst out of her skin. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Now _that’s_ unbecoming of the first daughter.”

She wants to slap him, or at the very least summon up some witty retort – _unbecoming? Really? Are they in the fucking sixteenth century?_ – but all she can seem to do is let herself fall open further, come apart at the seams, thighs parting to allow him better access as he buries his hand between them. He hasn’t slid off her panties, only moved the crotch of them to the side, but he shifts it back right then as if to torment her, applying pressure to the nub of her clit over the sopping lace, driving her mad with the indirectness of the stimulation, the dulled sensation. Teasing her, God, he’s such a-

A slight jolt forward, all at once; slight, but enough to bring her crashing back down to earth. They’re coming to a stop. Braking.

“We’re here,” Asher’s voice announces over the intercom, and Laurel could scream. She really, really could.

Frank draws his hand back so quickly it makes her whine, removing what looks like a handkerchief from his pocket to dry his sticky fingers before tucking it back inside. She’s left flushed and panting against the seat, thighs soaked, dress hiked up, halfway unraveled and nowhere near presentable – and when Frank smirks like the cat that ate the canary and goes for the car door, she’s on the brink of plotting his very swift yet very brutal murder.

“I got the door,” he announces, and Laurel has little choice but to close her legs and go stumbling out behind him.

 

~

 

One interminably long elevator ride and fifty stories later, she’s setting foot inside the Castillo family penthouse on First Avenue, and she’s not any less wet, and she’s _certainly_ not any less pissed.

It’s the embodiment of excess, this place, bought by money filthier than mud; two floors, six bedrooms, all sleek chrome and floor-to-ceiling windows and sparse décor, no colors other than black and white and faint shades of grey throughout. It’s modern almost to the point of being sterile, unwelcoming in its minimalism, the furniture aesthetically pleasing at the expense of real functionality. The marble floor is polished and gleaming; her footsteps echo across it as she walks. Outside, the city lights throw themselves upon the river, running together like a watercolor and painting the surface shades of shimmering gold and sunset orange.

There’s a reason the left-wing pundits call her father an elitist son of a bitch. She’s sure this place is a pretty sizable chunk of that reason.

Thankfully, he’s nowhere to be found, having taken Air Force One back to D.C. after the show with Elena to attend to some pressing matter of state. Her brothers both have their own residences in the city. After Laurel sends the few lingering staff away, she’s finally, blessedly alone.

Not that she intends to stay that way for long.

She left Frank outside the main door, the others stationed either down the hall at their command post or by the entrance to the penthouse’s private elevator. She knows she can’t be careless, steal him away immediately, and so she pours herself a glass of wine from a bottle she finds in the kitchen; something dry and red and French. Ludicrously expensive too, probably, seeing as Elena’s always been a wine snob – and a general snob, at that.

She waits. Drinks. Watches the odd geometric clock on the wall in the living room tick the minutes away. Her entire body is ablaze, simmering lowly, her desire turning to embers between her legs that need only be stoked once to send them into a roaring flame once more. She considers leaning back on the sofa or absconding to the master bedroom, reaching down and fucking herself on her fingers until her appetite is sated, and it would be so easy. She could. Maybe she _should_ ; get herself off and leave him outside in the cold, scratching at her door like a stray dog, begging for a table scrap.

Instead, she waits. And then, finally, at the stroke of midnight, she moves in.

She removes her heels and pads her way over to the door, creaking it open slowly and poking her head out. Frank is right where she’d left him, spine straight, suit immaculate despite their hasty limo romp, hands folded in front of him. He barely reacts when she opens the door, though, only gives her a cursory glance over his shoulder, which she responds to with a narrowing of her eyes and an insistent jerk of her head, beckoning him to enter. There’s no one around – no one she can see, anyway, though there must be cameras; agents had outfitted this place from top to bottom with them – but she doesn’t risk speaking, at least not until they’re inside and she’s settling herself back down on the pristine white sofa, legs crossed chastely, fingers curled around her wine glass.

Frank doesn’t survey his surroundings, impressive though they are; he doesn’t seem to care about looking at anything except her, and there’s a rakish darkness in those eyes of his, a glimmer of mischief. He’s up to no good, that much is clear. They both are.

“Nice digs,” he remarks finally, tucking his hands into his pockets, but Laurel doesn’t soften, doesn’t walk over and kiss him or let herself be kissed. She doesn’t even move.

She only sharpens her gaze and fires away. “Take off your clothes.”

“’Scuse me?”

He’s surprised. She never gets tired of surprising him; something about Frank emboldens her, empowers her to take control in a life where she often feels like she controls so little, dressed up and paraded like a prized poodle behind her father, pasting on smiles at the foundation for their legions of old, crusty, obscenely wealthy donors, shuffled around with Kan at her side like a pawn on a chess board. There’s no pretense or airs, here.

This is war, and he started it, and now… Now, she’s going to be the one to finish it.

“Did I stutter?”

Disbelief melts into amusement. Frank arches a brow. “Y’know, I’m an agent of the United States Secret Service, one of the most respected law enforcement agencies in the country. Not Magic Frank.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” She lets herself smile over the rim of her glass, giving a thoughtful hum. “That could be your ticket into parties. You know, like the cops who show up and pretend to shut it down and just… start pulling off their clothes.”

He chuckles. “I’m feelin’ a bit objectified right now, I gotta say.”

Laurel shrugs, takes another sip. “Good. And,” she pauses, licking her lips clean, “if you’re not going to do what I want, you might as well go.”

He could refuse. Defy her, toy with her like she’s toying with him – but he must know how much his obedience gets her off more than his insolence ever could, because Frank reaches up, without further comment, tugging at his tie until it comes loose around his neck, then going for his shirt. He moves quickly, methodically; slower than he needs to, perhaps, but not overly leisurely. Not to put on a show, though she’s rapt nonetheless, captivated as she paints on a façade of affected nonchalance, drinking her wine, flavor bursting on her tongue. She feels like she saw this in an old Hollywood movie, once; a woman disrobing before her lover as he watches without a word, leaning back, sipping his drink and drinking in the sight before him. A glamourous seduction all in black and white.

It’s more than a bit refreshing for the roles to be reversed. For him to be the watched and her to be the watcher, her the subject and him the object.

He’s down to his slacks when Laurel stands with a huff, feigning disinterest, like she isn’t so wet she’s almost fucking dripping, like he hasn’t done enough to hold her attention and will have to try much harder, do better than that. Laurel sets her glass aside and comes to stand at one of the windows, peering out, pressing her hands up against the cold glass.

She watches her reflection as Frank approaches her from behind, dim and featureless in the glass, wearing only his slacks with the belt hanging loose. She eyes the trail of hair on his abdomen which leads past his navel and ventures perilously lower, disappearing beneath his waistline, and she thinks of following it, of dropping down to her knees and tugging off his slacks and wrapping her lips around his cock. She could destroy him so easily, that way, but his hands come to rest on her hips before she can contemplate pursuing that course of action any further. They feel enormous, fanning out wide on her hipbones, rough yet gentle, his touch almost tentative at first, before he grows braver and reaches up, brushing her hair over her shoulder, laying a kiss on the exposed nape of her neck.

“I watched you. All night,” he rasps, and when his hands go for her zipper, she shudders hard enough to make her bones clatter beneath her skin. “Wanted to rip this right off you. Pull you up on that stage and fuck you in front of all of them.”

Oh, God, the thought is twisted, fucked up in every conceivable way something _can_ be fucked up, and still it makes her shiver in delight, press her thighs together where she stands. She’s leaking like a sieve, her panties ruined, and the wanting comes surging back all at once when before it’d faded into a distant background hum, like white noise. Once he has her dress peeled down and hanging limply at her waist, his hands go for her breasts, tugging them out of their cups and palming them, lips on her neck, pulling red marks from her skin she’ll have to cover diligently tomorrow morning, though she secretly wants nothing more than to leave them for everyone to see – the tabloids, Kan. The press would drive themselves insane over it.

This isn’t a war, tonight, she realizes. Though it isn’t love either.

_Or is it?_

She shakes the thought away and centers herself just in time to feel Frank reaching down, hooking his hands into the sides of her panties and pulling them over her ass, and it faintly occurs to her that they shouldn’t do this, here, if by some miracle the paparazzi commandeer a news helicopter and find themselves treated to the story – and the _scene_ – of a lifetime.

Let them, she thinks. Let them all see. All of them. Her father. Elena. Kan. Every last one of them.

She’s terrible. She’s twisted. She has everything and all she ever wants is more, more, more, and everything she does have she has a sudden, overpowering longing to _destroy_. Take a baseball bat to the chandelier in the dining room and the fine china in the kitchen and priceless sculptures scattered about until they’re all a useless, shattered heap of glass and there’s nothing left, only the two of them in the wreckage.

“Oh, fuck…” she whines. He rewards her with a smack on her ass, and the resulting burning sensation surges downward to mingle with the burning in her cunt until it’s amplified tenfold, until she’s so agonizingly empty she could scream. “Frank-”

She can see herself in the window, cheeks glowing red like cherries, eyes glazed over, hands braced against the glass, palms pressed flat. Frank is behind her, eyes as dark as the devil, an incubus. Inviting disaster on them both.

Fuck. _Shit_ , she’s never going to be able to stop. Stop this. Stop _wanting_ him. Not ever. He’s kindled something within her that she doesn’t think she’s going to be able to extinguish; like a coal seam fire ignited deep underneath the earth, burning for centuries, scorching through her veins until she’s nothing but ash and hollow bone.

“You don’t want him. Kan. Not like you want me,” he continues, and she can’t assert he’s even remotely wrong because she’s told him as much to his face, that Kan is a safe, likable, harmless choice for a boyfriend, that her father approves wholeheartedly. That she _doesn’t_ want him like she wants Frank. “Ten years from now when you’re lyin’ in bed with him, princess, I’m gonna be the one you think about. That one you can’t forget.”

“You’re so… fucking cocky,” she pants out, and Frank lowers his eyes to his groin, quirking an eyebrow.

“In more ways ‘n one, I’d say.”

She chokes out a laugh, but it dies on her tongue when she feels him positioning his knee between her thighs to urge them apart, open her up for him. Frank reaches down, slipping a hand across her cunt from behind, just as wet as he’d left it in the car, quivering, and she hears the tug of a zipper and the rustling of fabric, and then-

“Wait,” she blurts out, suddenly, her eyes drawn out the window, to the sheer drop below. She’s pressed so close against it she feels like she could fall at any second, her blood crystallizing to ice in her veins. “Not… not here. I-”

Frank stops, resting a hand on her chin and urging her to look back at him. He isn’t impatient, irritated. There’s so much tenderness in his gaze it feels like it could melt her. “You okay?”

“It’s dumb,” Laurel murmurs, breath fogging up the glass, desire and equally potent fear warring in her stomach. “I’m… just scared of heights.”

A pause. Then, before she knows it, he’s lacing her hands in with his, pressing them against the glass, and urging her to bend over slightly, allowing him better access. His lips brush her shoulder, his breath as scalding as steam – but he’s firm. Steady as a stone.

“I got you,” he soothes, and she moans before she can help it. “I won’t let you fall.”

He’s got her. He won’t let her fall.

She can feel herself falling anyway. And not in the way he means.

When he finally sinks into her, her knees nearly give out, crumbling like pillars beneath her weight, but he has her wedged so firmly between the glass and his body that she doesn’t go down. She stumbles, a little, but he’s there to catch her, murmuring in her ear as they stabilize together; consoling words that alternate with the filthy, the depraved, things that make her tremble to her molten core.

It’s all a flurry of movement; his thrusts as he buries himself in her to the hilt, practiced strokes that slowly increase in intensity, his fingers as they circle her clit, blurring together until she’s no longer able to identify which hand is which, whether or not the window before them really exists or if they’ve broken past it, gone tumbling toward certain death. She’s sticky with sweat and shivering from the icy caress of the glass and the penthouse air, and she swears the oxygen itself must be thinner up here because she can’t breathe, can’t find the lung capacity to do so. She’s afraid, that old foolish childhood fear of heights piercing her chest, splitting her open, but Frank has her. He’s got her. He’s not letting go. And she doesn’t need to be afraid. If they fall, they fall together.

She won’t look down.

“More,” she whimpers, pitching herself forward ever so slightly more, raising her ass. She can imagine how she looks, right now: dress hiked up and falling off her and panties at her ankles, begging for more, her ass cheeks red from his slap and the rest of her body painted a similar shade. It only makes her moan louder, push back against his thrusts. “ _More_ – fuck… ah-”

“Now,” he tells her – and there’s an edge to his voice she hasn’t heard, before. It’s an order. “Let go.”

Let go. Stop holding on. Let herself fall. She’s afraid – fuck, she’s so afraid, afraid of falling and afraid of everything she feels for him, the immensity of it welling in her chest, but she feels so sturdy, too, anchored with his hands in hers, holding on fast, like a lifeline. She can no longer see the floor beneath them, pressed up hard against the glass as she is, his cock drubbing her. She’s going to fall – fall into her climax and fall out this window and fall for _him_ , fall in any one of those ways or perhaps all three, and she can’t even find the will to fight it, hold out. She’s already jumped off the ledge. She leapt the instant she coaxed him into the pool at Camp David.

Now, she supposes, there’s nothing left to do but let herself plummet.

The world catches fire when she comes, and everything is chaos behind her eyes, some levee inside her breaking and a devastating wall of water rushing forth. Frank fucks her through it, pace quickening, growing increasingly irregular as she clenches like a fist around him, the dizzying waves never seeming to ebb, only crest and flow over her and suck her under again and again, until she’s crying out loud enough for half the city of New York to hear, the window covered with the fog of her breath and the faint smudges of her fingerprints.

This is all hers, she thinks as she peers out over the city, half-mad with pleasure. She has money, her family power, and yet all that matters, all she could ever want is what’s right here. _Him_.

It lasts simultaneously an eternity and a millisecond, and by the time she’s coming down she’s faintly cognizant of the feeling of Frank spilling inside her, hot and sudden, groaning her name into her shoulder along with a chain of mostly incoherent obscenities, words her foggy mind can’t even attempt to piece together. She feels as brainless as she is boneless, and the only thing that breaks through the haze in her mind is the scratchy sensation of his lips trailing lazily across the span of her shoulders, covering every inch.

Frank, surprisingly enough, is the one who collects himself long enough to speak first. “See? Didn’t let you fall after all.”

“Would you?” she asks, still not entirely sure of what she’s saying; babbling, almost, about as intelligible as a sleep talk. She hisses a laugh, still struggling to catch her breath. “Ever?”

She doesn’t know exactly what she’s asking, or if she means it in a literal or figurative sense – and _sense_ is also something the question is sorely lacking; it makes none. Yet it feels like it has weight regardless. Like it really does mean something.

Would he let her fall. Feed her to the wolves if they’re discovered, if this all goes to shit tomorrow. He could. She mistrusts everyone out of habit, and perhaps Frank is no different, would run to the first media outlet that shows any interest and sell his story; the torrid love affair between the president’s daughter and a former agent on her Secret Service detail, all the filthy intimate details. Air her dirty laundry to millions. It’d be an irresistible headline. Profitable, too. He could.

He wouldn’t. She doesn’t know how she knows. Only that she does.

“Fuck no,” he growls, turning her around and kissing her deeply, hands rising again to her breasts. “It’s you ‘n me. Against all of ‘em. The entire goddamn _world_.”

“You’d get fired. If… anyone finds out,” she remarks, a bit glumly, pulling away. “My father would kill you. And I mean that literally.”

He tugs her toward the spiral staircase without another word, setting a course for the bedroom. “I’d like to see him try.”

 

~

 

She rides him on the king bed in the master suite for what feels like hours, mussing the million thread-count sheets and casting aside the goose down comforter until the room is in a state of sex-soaked disarray. She’s sweaty and fatigued but still so hungry, a sort of bone-deep hunger that sucks, destroys, always demands more, a blood sacrifice. She thinks she knew from the start that this is how it would be, with Frank; somehow she’d sensed it, but she’s unnerved by the power of it, the hold it has on her. That _he_ has on her.

They work up a sweat and an appetite, the latter of which the restaurant downstairs is more than happy to provide for, and they order dinner and champagne on ice and strawberries covered in chocolate, delivered all on a cart straight to their front door. They eat in bed, afterward, as they stare out at the expansive view of the city, all those millions of people as tiny and inconsequential as ants. Somehow to Laurel it feels as if they might as well be the last two humans left on earth, inhabiting their own separate pocket of time and space altogether.

“Y’know,” she begins, lips wrapped around a strawberry, making a show of sucking the juices out of it. She’s nude on top of the sheets, propped up on one elbow, luxuriating in her nakedness, “I can’t believe you could’ve had almost any dish in the world made to order, and you chose _spaghetti and meatballs_.”

Frank shrugs, eyes settling on the discarded plate he’d finished a number of minutes ago. “What can I say? I’m a simple man with simple tastes. And, for the record, that sauce doesn’t hold a candle to mine.”

She scoffs. “You’re really telling me you can outdo a restaurant with three Michelin stars?”

“I am and I can. Come over to my place when we get back. I’ll prove it.”

Laurel smirks. “We taking the philandering presidents’ tunnel again?”

“Can’t exactly sweep you off your feet right out the front door, can I?”

She wilts a little at the truth of his words, because they can be free here, perhaps, at least to some extent, but not there, not in their everyday lives, those worldly personas they’re fettered by. “No. I guess not.”

Silence sweeps over them. It’s a bit sullen, contemplative when everything had been so lighthearted before, and Laurel sighs, setting aside the strawberry leaves, licking her fingers clean.

Frank, finally, is the one who puts it to an end.

“You said your dad would kill me if he found out,” he teases, eyebrows raised. “Real question is, would your boyfriend?”

She can’t help but chortle at the thought. “Kan? Please. He’s the kind of person who catches spiders and lets them go instead of smashing them.”

Laurel won’t lie; she does feel some measure of guilt talking about Kan this way, when he’s never been anything less than perfectly considerate and kind and – well, flat out _perfect_. Perfect and safe; the ideal beau, challenging no norms, upsetting no careful balances, just fitting easily into her neat, clean, picturesque little life. He understands her better than the majority of the men that’ve shared her bed, yet he’s always eternally leaving her wanting more – more depth, more fire, more _something_ , some elusive feeling she’s never been able to pin down or identify the name of. Laurel might call it love, if she were a romantic.

But she’s not. So she won’t.

“Did my research,” Frank tells her, rising from the bed to pour them both a fresh glass of champagne. “Good family. Wants to run for Congress. Republican. Moderate. Could probably do worse for a political marriage, if you gotta marry into the GOP.”

“Research? You trying to see how you measure up or something?”

“Not in the literal sense,” he quips, smirking, and she rolls her eyes, admiring the view of him from behind nonetheless. “We both know there ain’t no competition there.”

“Well, I’m not, by the way. Marrying him.”

Frank makes his way back over to her and sinks down onto the mattress by her legs, holding out the glass of champagne for her to take. She does, staring at the bubbles as they rise to the surface and rubbing her lips together, her stomach feeling equally fizzy at the mention of marriage.

“That ain’t what you want?” he presses, eyes dancing. “Be a congressman’s wife? Settle down in Vermont, toss your law degree in the trash? Pop out a couple kids for the campaign ads?”

She cringes inwardly, horrified by the idea – perhaps even more so by how plausible it seems; going from politician’s daughter to politician’s wife, the same pipeline that’d delivered her pill-popping, raging alcoholic of a stepmother straight to the door of the White House. If she lets it happen, she knows it probably will.

“Like hell it is,” she finally declares, decisively. “I’d be the president, he’d be the First Man.”

Frank grins. “That what you want, then? To be president?”

“No,” she confesses, finally, all jokes aside. She swirls her champagne, watching it slosh around in her glass. “I want to get as far away from politics as possible. Go to law school and… _do_ something. Make a difference. Fight for all the people my dad’s going to fuck over. Because there’ll be a lot, believe me.”

“I’d vote for you, for what it’s worth,” Frank tells her, smoothing a hand up and down her leg. “Hell, I’d even be your running mate.”

“The Castillo Delfino ticket,” Laurel recites, testing each syllable on her tongue. “It does have a certain ring to it.”

“Think I’d be happier being your trophy husband anyway.”

“Mmm. Then _you’d_ be First Man. Got any… strong opinions on the White House china?”

“Fuck china; just keep me in the bedroom or kitchen all day. Only things I’d be good for.”

They dissolve into laughter, and Laurel flips onto her back, resting her head on the pillow, so perfectly content she almost can’t wrap her head around it – but this feels like more than just contentment, something so surface-level, ultimately superficial. She’s _happy_. She can’t remember ever feeling happiness as pure as this before in her life; something always happens, takes it away. Steals it from her grasp just as soon as she gets a hold of it.

Frank shifts and slides himself up towards her after they sober up, coming to rest at her side. He’s serious, all at once, furrowing his brow, as if troubled.

“Leave him,” he murmurs, without warning, and if he’s trying to hide the desperation in his voice, he isn’t doing a good job of it. “Leave him for me. I want you, Laurel. All of you.”

All. Not just some. She’s not sure she can ever give him _all_ of her, at least not anywhere except behind closed doors, hidden away; it’s their tragedy, their circumstances, the lives they’re bound to. The people they are. She’s not sure she can ever be free from her name, from her father. She can never be just another girl, now. Fade into obscurity.

She bristles. “Frank…”

“Look, I know we can’t tell anyone. I know how this’s gotta be, at least for now. But I’m givin’ you all of me. I’m not doin’ this halfway. That’s not who I am.”

“Okay,” she affirms, finally, dragging her eyes up to meet his. “Then… we do this. We go all in.”

Warmth glitters in his eyes. He moves closer, and they fit together so naturally, so easily. “Are you? All in?”

“I am,” is all she has time to say, before he silences her with a kiss. “If you are.”

All in. She’s showed her hand. He has, too. Yet part of Laurel still feels like she’s bluffing, lying to him; that she simply isn’t capable of going _all in_ with anyone, even him.

She jettisons the thought, loses herself in the press of his lips. She used to kiss delicately, it occurs to her. She was that girlish, diffident cliché of lowered eyes and batted eyelashes and flushed cheeks, but now she’s ravenous, vicious, kissing to consume, open-mouthed and dirty, and before long she’s rolling him onto his back and kissing her way down his stomach, descending until her lips find his cock.

He’s gentle with her when she takes him into her mouth; no yanking at her hair to pull her closer, control her, assert some kind of dominance. Instead he strokes it as he watches her, carding his fingers through and tucking a strand softly behind her ear, letting himself unravel beneath the heat of her mouth. He gives up control to her freely, seeming to delight in being brought to his knees, or maybe by simple virtue of the fact that it’s _her_ bringing him there. He’s all suit and sunglasses and scowls during the daylight hours, but here – here, he’s something else entirely, not at all afraid of how vulnerable wanting her makes him.

Here, at least for now, he’s hers. Completely. Unequivocally. Dangerously.

All hers.


	7. July

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There may be too many Bill Clinton references in here.... but really, I don't think there's such thing as too many Bill Clinton references and realistically, when will I have this opportunity again....
> 
> Drop a comment if you're still liking this!!! I know I take ages to update but I got caught up on this chap for some reason, but here it is, FINALLY :D

The Fourth of July celebration on the South Lawn is in full swing by the time Laurel finds the fortitude to mingle.

It’s been a tradition since Carter, roughly the same every year; a cookout and picnic for military families at the White House, followed by a speech from the president and a USO concert, all topped off with a fireworks show over the National Mall. Her father chooses not to deviate much from the norm, though his version of the event is a bit less bombastic than those of the past, less big-name artists and more casual, every inch of red, white, and blue décor still practically dripping patriotism. He delivers his remarks from the Truman Balcony with Elena at his side, a little tin god on his dais, and for once leaves Laurel and the rest of her siblings out of it.

Kan is by her side as they integrate themselves into the crowd, Frank hovering at a safe distance, orbiting her like a planet on a path that feels increasingly distant. Never getting too close. Never daring to, not here. She tries to ignore the guilt settling like ice into her veins, distract herself by speaking to the guests, but she’s so hyperaware of the weight of his stare that it barely helps.

She’s spooning a thick, cholesterol-packed glob of potato salad onto a paper plate a while later when three sharp taps on her shoulder jolt her out of her thoughts, and Laurel turns, only to find Michaela there, smiling, resplendent in a knee-length navy sundress with a laminated press pass dangling around her neck.

“That’s a good look, you know. Switching out the caviar for potato salad, for once.”

Laurel scoffs, and wraps her free arm around her in an awkward side-hug. “Okay, one? You know I hate caviar. And two? It’s pretty killer potato salad.” She looks her up and down, relaxing somewhat. “What’re you doing here?”

“Work. Somebody’s gotta write a puff piece about POTUS grilling hot dogs and hamburgers like any nice old American dad, don’t they?”

Laurel follows her gaze over to the grill where her father stands, donning a red, white, and blue striped apron and poking at a hamburger with a pair of tongs, flushed from the heat and smoke and conversing merrily with the people around him. She has to hand it to him; he’s good, falling naturally into the rhythm of the everyman when need be, though she knows he’ll probably throw in the towel after about ten minutes, once the photographers have snapped their fair share of pictures.

“Yeah, well,” Laurel quips. “I’d avoid eating anything that comes off that grill if you’re not a fan of raw meat. He’s never touched one of those things before in his life.”

“Noted,” Michaela shoots back, picking up a plate and following Laurel down the line of food. “Kan here?”

 _Unfortunately_. Laurel bites back the word, and instead only nods in the direction of the volleyball net nearby where Kan stands, hands clasped together, eyeing the ball as it flies back and forth. He’s good at it too, it occurs to her; more genuine than her father, but still a child of privilege and politics just like she is, aware of the importance of optics above all else. It all seems so casual, so real – when none of this is, when often times Laurel feels like a fish in a fishbowl, observed from all sides, swimming about under constant scrutiny; an ant under a magnifying glass gradually being burnt to a crisp.

Except when she’s with Frank. With Frank she feels understood. _Seen_. And Frank is losing patience with her, with Kan, with the meticulously staged circus that is her life as a sideshow to her father. He has his sunglasses on, as always, but she can feel the frustration radiating off him in waves as he watches her, broken promises of _all in_ lying at her feet, caught between a Kan and a Frank and a hard place of her own making.

She doesn’t realize her eyes have drifted towards Frank where he stands posted across the way, dressed down to blend into the crowd, until Michaela’s voice barges its way back into her consciousness. “Laurel? Earth to Laurel. Who’re you staring at-”

Michaela cuts herself off when she tracks her gaze over to Frank, and the instant she falls silent Laurel stiffens – because Michaela is perceptive, probably too perceptive for her own good, and she knows she’s sensed her discontent with Kan, that stubborn longing for more which found an outlet in Frank.

“Nothing,” she mutters hastily, retreating away from the table, as far away from the crowd as she can manage without being too obvious. “I – no one.”

“Don’t lie to me; you were staring at him. Agent Beard. I remember him.”

“His-” Her voice clumps in her throat like glue, weak and useless. “His name’s Frank, okay, and I wasn’t staring, I…”

“I knew something was up with you. It’s him. Are you… oh my God, wait, are you _screwing him_?”

Laurel glances around furtively, and thankfully no one seems to be paying any special attention to them, because if perceptiveness is Michaela’s talent, blending in is Laurel’s, and there are times when being the White House Wallflower comes in handy. “We can’t have this conversation here.”

“So you are!” Michaela hisses under her breath, not particularly accusatory; more than anything, she just looks elated to be right. “You’re not even denying it!”

Laurel exhales sharply. “It doesn’t matter, it’s-”

“’First daughter’s illicit romance with agent on her Secret Service detail.’ _God_ , that would be one hell of a headline.”

“You can’t… tell anyone,” Laurel urges, her insides all tangled up into one massive, aching Gordian knot. “Seriously, Michaela-”

“Relax. You know I won’t.” She gives a dreamy sigh. “It’s just nice to picture that being my big break is all.”

“It doesn’t matter. It just – I fucked up. It’s probably already over. And it didn’t…” Her eyes gravitate toward Frank once more. She swallows. “It’s not like it meant anything, anyway.”

“You know, I would’ve expected this of Elena – not you. You’re really already at the bored cheating housewife stage with Kan?”

The statement is too true for comfort. Laurel massages her temple with her one free hand, her appetite for the food on her plate all but eradicated. “God, I sound pathetic.”

“Mmm,” Michaela hums, taking a sip of the lemonade she’d snagged from the end of the table. “No comment on that. _But_ , I will say if you ever suddenly feel the urge to unburden yourself on record… I’m more than willing to hear your confession.”

“I would if I could.” Laurel smirks wryly at the thought. “Think my dad would have a coronary. He’d probably send the CIA after Frank. Take him to some… black site south of the border and feed him cyanide tablets.”

“You said you fucked up,” Michaela mentions. “What happened?”

“I told him I’d leave Kan for him. Go… all in. And I still haven’t. I’m-” She cuts herself off, pressing her lips into a grim line. “I keep making excuses. Putting it off.”

“So? Just dump him.”

“It’s-” She shakes her head. “It’s not that simple, you know that.”

“You wanna be with him? Go be with him. Screw Kan; I guarantee you could walk into the RNC tomorrow and find ten guys who look exactly like him. You want to be conflicted so you don’t feel like a bad person, I get that. And sure, the press’ll speculate for a day, maybe two – but they’ll move on. So should you. This mopey guilty puppy act isn’t endearing in 2017; it’s boring.”

She can’t help but laugh at her casually judgy tone, snarking right back at her. “I appreciate your candor.”

“Damn right you do. And like I said. You ever want to go public with the Tall Dark and Bearded over there? You know who to call to pen the exposé. I smell a Pulitzer Prize, baby.”

Michaela leaves her with a wink and a flourish. Laurel just rolls her eyes, smiling as she goes.

 

~

 

Everyone is settling in for the fireworks show at sunset when she finally manages to pull Frank aside and sneak off into the West Wing.

It’s a wonderfully stupid idea – emphasis on the _stupid_ , she thinks, as they make their way through the winding halls, past a rather skeletal staff; most everyone is at the fireworks, only a few Secret Service left posted inside. The less people to see them, the better, and though she’s sure the agents are bewildered, none of them make any remarks, and certainly none of them dare to stop her. Frank seems equally perplexed by her intended destination, though he doesn’t question her either until she’s ducking into the private dining room, taking his hand and tugging him through the president’s study, before finally stalking through the door that opens up to the Oval.

It’s smaller than it looks in pictures. That was the first thing she’d noticed, the first time she’d set foot inside here months ago; she’d imagined it would be bigger, more imposing, have a different sort of oxygen inside it, like she would _feel_ different simply standing inside this nucleus of power. The couches are caramel-colored suede, the drapes tall and gold-hued, the desk a rich, gleaming mahogany, and everything is ornate and sophisticated yet still somehow ordinary, a couch like any other couch, drapes like any other drapes. She makes a point to look unfazed as she comes to a stop in the middle of the room on the stately Presidential Seal, and glances back at Frank, who is still lingering by the wall, like a vampire seeking an invitation inside, unable to enter without it.

“You ever been in here before?” she asks, pacing idly around the room.

Frank tucks his hands into the pockets of his jeans, still far from pleased and similarly unimpressed by their surroundings. “Once or twice.”

Laurel hums, coming to a stop before one of the windows overlooking the South Lawn. With a quick, precise tug, she closes the curtains. “We need to talk.”

“There a reason you had to bring me here to do that?”

Two steps. Another tug. “Not really.” _Yes, really._

“You aren’t worried your boyfriend’ll miss you?”

“I think Kan can handle himself just fine,” she says, and with one last pull, the final set of curtains are yanked shut, cutting them off from the outside world. There’s a flicker in his eyes that leads her to believe he’s starting to pick up on her reasons for bringing him here. “And this whole jealous threatened-masculinity thing is _really_ not a turn on.”

Finally, he steps forward, jaw clenched, irate. “Know what else isn’t a turn on? Bein’ lied to to your face. You said you were all in, Laurel. That you were done with him. I guess I shoulda known better than to think you were tellin’ me the truth.”

That stirs something in her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re just like the rest of ‘em. Your dad. First Lady. You like to think you’re not, but you’re not any different. You’re a liar just like they are. At least they know full well they’re lyin’. I don’t even think you do anymore.” He isn’t yelling; Frank isn’t one to yell. He growls his words, spits them like he’s got her strapped to one enormous rotating Wheel of Death and he’s hurling knives in her direction, over and over, but he doesn’t _yell_. “That what you want? To get hitched to that kid because he looks nice on fuckin’ paper? That ain’t any kinda way to live your life. And if you wanna keep me around to follow you like a dog during the day, be your sex slave after hours, then I’m done.”

“I’m _not_ ,” she spits, venom in her words. There’s nothing worse he could have said to her, and he seems to understand that, “like them. And that’s not-”

“It’s not like this’s ever gonna work anyway. I’m never gonna be any more than your dirty little secret, ‘cause if the press found out, they’d have a goddamn field day-”

“I don’t care what they think – you know that!”

She advances on him, raising herself to her full height. Her black and white checkerboard sheath feels constrictive, all at once. She wants to rip it right off, rip his clothes off along with it, because there’s something maddeningly arousing about seeing Frank angry, genuinely flat-out fucking _pissed_. He’s so even-tempered sometimes it’s infuriating, impossible to rile up or get a reaction out of, and her blood isn’t boiling but it’s at a considerable simmer, the heat steadily rising.

“You say you don’t,” he retorts, lowering his voice. “But if you didn’t, you woulda already went out there and given your dad a piece of your mind on fuckin’ MSNBC and told him he can shove your trust fund where the sun don’t shine. You _do_ care, Laurel. You hate it. But you do.”

It’s a harsh truth. She should’ve known Frank would never give her anything less than brutal honesty, and while it’s refreshing, it’s also jarring, shaking her down to her bones, her marrow. She _does_ care. She’s been raised to value appearances above all else since she was in the damn cradle; it’s become her way of life, and all her silent, subtle rebellions have availed her nothing. She’s the worst kind of rebel, perhaps; the kind who believes they’ve rebelled when really they’re nothing more than a passive aggressive malcontent, daring to rebel in thought and whispered word only. A spoiled little rich girl who curses her father’s name under her breath one second and turns around and takes his money the next.

She hates herself. She hates Frank for making her so aware of the fact.

“Screw you,” she hisses back, and yanks him into a bruising kiss before he can so much as open his mouth to reply.

It’s a collision, more than anything, of teeth and tongue and lips and bodies, yet it’s graceful somehow; call and response, as natural as breathing. She feels like she’s trying to prove some kind of point although she isn’t sure what it is, exactly, and there’s a red haze clouding her thoughts as well as her judgement, neither one functioning properly. Frank surges into the kiss almost immediately, opening his mouth, backing her up until her ass slams against the desk, and only then does he pull away, panting, like something has just occurred to him.

“There’re cameras in here,” he tells her, and she hardly bats an eye.

She gives a flippant little shrug, leaning back onto the desk, taking a seat, spreading her legs, and putting on her best fuck-me eyes. “So? Get the footage deleted.”

“There’s someone watchin’ it now,” he warns, and she leans back just one degree of an angle further, tugging at the hem of her dress to raise it slowly, torturously, signaling to him that they’ve careened past the point of return already and she’s not going back, changing course because of any goddamn cameras. She brought him here for one very specific purpose and that purpose is to fuck him on her father’s desk in the heart of the White House, the heart of the _country_ , and it’s so delightfully twisted and reckless it makes her toes curl.

“Then you better make me scream. Make it interesting.”

Frank’s anger fades to a cool amusement, right then, as he stands before her, only inches away, eyeing her spread legs; her the superior and him the subordinate, a tale as old as time. She feels power flooding her veins like opium; she thinks she can almost understand her father’s megalomania, just being in this room, at the center of the free world. She may be a pawn in his game, but tonight, tonight, she’s the queen, the most powerful piece on the board, and she’s put Frank in checkmate, lined him right in her crosshairs, and there’s no way out for him now – even if he wanted one.

Which he _doesn’t._

His smirk is absolutely filthy. “Who am I, Monica Lewinsky now?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she quips, reaching up to finger his collar. “You’re much prettier.”

She’s losing focus, losing herself in the press of his body, the feeling of her spread legs and the vulnerability and simultaneous authority the position gives her. Frank runs his eyes over her, assessing the situation, as if deciding whether or not to obey, whether to link hands with her and jump off this cliff of depravity, though she has the sense he’s just pretending, that he’s already made up his mind, that he made it up the second they set foot in here. There are an infinite number of ways this could end badly, and the wicked drop in her stomach at the thought shoots straight to her cunt, makes her drip.

He’s reaching down, then, hiking her dress up, so slowly it makes her squirm. “You’ve lost it.”

She breathes a laugh, leaning back to allow him better access as Frank sinks down to his knees and runs his hands up and down her thighs, surveying his kingdom; long, smooth, stocking-clad legs, the wanting juncture of her thighs. She hooks a leg over his shoulder, holding him there, her heel tumbling off and landing with a dull _thump_ on the carpet beside him.

“What?” Laurel breathes, feigning confusion. “If Bill Clinton can get head of state in here, why can’t I?”

Frank wastes no time, peeling off her stockings and panties like he’s done it a thousand times before – and she wonders if he has, if he makes a habit of fucking his protectees, though there’s a certain sincerity behind his wickedness that makes her doubt it; a desire for more. He wants more than what she’s giving him and she’s not overly familiar with that, with men wanting something other than just sex from her; it almost makes her chafe, makes her want to bolt and run away and never look back, but just as there’s no escaping for him tonight, she has no escape, either.

And then he’s prying her thighs apart, those disarming blue eyes locked on her, and leaning in, and devouring her in one bite – and suddenly, she’s not doing much thinking about anything at all.

It’s not the feeling that’s the best part – although yeah, that’s a significantly fucking _amazing_ part of getting eaten out, she’s not denying that. It’s the sight of him; the way he looks knelt there before her, subservient but not desperate, utterly in control, zeroed in on her. He clocks every reaction of her body to his mouth, even the subtlest ones, brushing his fingers over the goosebumps on her legs and reading them like braille, decoding her so effortlessly, like breathing life into a dead language.

He’s eaten her pussy before, what must be hundreds of times; he has an almost bizarre enthusiasm for the act and a borderline inhuman jaw stamina, she’s come to learn – and yet just watching him now, mouth gaping wide on her cunt, not wanting to waste a single drop of her, _God_ , it undoes her in an instant. It feels like the first time all over again.

He throws himself into this, into _her_ ; it’s a sort of attentiveness she might find unnerving, if she were able to devote brainpower to anything other than that agonizing pressure swelling between her legs, clamping and twisting and turning and churning white-hot in her belly. She thinks the sky could fall around them right about now and he wouldn’t even notice, would go to his grave eating her out with no qualms whatsoever about it. He surges all at once, without warning, moving his lips up to suckle at her clit and pressing two fingers inside her, and it’s almost humiliating how close she is already, just barely able to keep herself propped up on her elbows to watch him.

She can’t look away. She’s never seen anything like this. Like _him_.

“Oh… oh, fuck… fuck, oh my _God_ , right there-”

If these walls could talk. Shit, the stories they could tell. She’s burning all over, grabbing at his head but trying to resist the urge to yank him closer as Frank licks a stripe from the base of her pussy to her clit as if savoring some impossibly sweet confection. Her legs are spread, thighs splayed apart, gossamer lace panties dangling delicately on one of her ankles, bare ass on the spotless mahogany, and Laurel wants to laugh, right then, to think they call her the Wallflower.

For the record, Bill Clinton has absolutely fucking _nothing_ on her.

When she comes, her entire body locks up, rising toward him, into the heat of his mouth, but he doesn’t move back, ease up in any way. He’s relentless, unceasing, holding her down and lapping her up and licking her until her clit is raw and aching and painfully sensitive, until she can feel herself bowling into another orgasm, which hits her quick in succession, ripping through her like buckshot, leaving her twitching and begging and half-sobbing. She has no concept of time, right then, but if she did she’d realize it’s been hardly four minutes; no time at all.

These sorts of trysts _do_ necessitate speed, she supposes.

She’s seeing those much-cliched stars when Frank finally urges her to sit up, dutifully sliding her panties and stockings back on, and she’s too boneless and wrung out to help him much, beyond lifting her legs and ass. He works with a sort of single-minded diligence, devoted so wholly and completely to her, and she can’t help but melt as the stars fade from her vision, and she realizes they weren’t stars at all; they’re _fireworks_. Not the figurative, orgasm-induced kind, either.

“Look!” she breathes, tugging down her dress hastily and making her way over to the window, peeling back the curtain, as gleeful as a child on her first Independence Day.

Outside, the sky is lit up, an American canvas of shimmering red, white and blue over the National Mall. It takes Frank a while longer to come to his senses, realize what she means, and when he does he takes his place behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist, nuzzling her neck as the show plays out before them. The lights from the window reflect on them where they stand, illuminating them with a kaleidoscope of patriotic colors that go dim between each volley, leaving visible trails of sparks and smoke in their wake. When she looks back and meets Frank’s eyes, he’s smiling at her like a fool, barely paying any attention to the show at all.

“You’re not watching,” she mock-scolds, still breathless, shaken by the intensity of his stare, the adoration contained within it.

“I seen fireworks before,” he remarks, unconcerned, and doesn’t tear his gaze from her. Another round goes off outside, clusters of red stars bursting apart in the sky before falling earthward and fading, all their magnificence transitory, barely there before it’s gone.  “I’ll see ‘em again. You, though?” He pauses, laying his lips on her neck. “You’re a once-in-a-lifetime kinda thing, babe.”

The words catch her off guard with their tenderness; somehow, even now, he still has the ability to do that to her. They’re like a sucker punch in the gut that leaves her blissfully lightheaded, and all she can do is give him a loopy, dazed smile and lace her fingers in with his as they peer out over the South Lawn, the darkened silhouettes of families huddled together on blankets spread out before them, the stark white obelisk of the Washington Monument rising up in the distance.

This does feel once-in-a-lifetime. Somehow, some way, it feels like _more_. She doesn’t think many people ever get the chance to feel the way she’s feeling, right now.

“Mmm,” she hums, without looking back at him, contentment humming in her bones like the summer song of cicadas outside. She rubs her hand up and down the length of his forearm, sighing. “Happy Fourth.”

“For the record,” Frank teases, “I think I went above and _beyond_ my patriotic duty. Eating out the first daughter in the Oval Office on the Fourth of July? It don’t get more patriotic than that.”

They dissolve into laughter, and once they sober up Laurel turns, slightly, enough to catch his eye out of her periphery. He’s shaded alternating hues of blue and gold in the reflection of the fireworks – they both are – and his arms feel like anchors, so steady, the realest thing in her life. All at once, everything is still, even the fireworks outside. It all fades away to a distant hum in the background until it’s only the two of them, pressed in so close they’re barely distinguishable from one another in the shadows.

She hadn’t expected to feel this way, about him. Hadn’t seen it coming. She doesn’t think that’s any reason to resist.

“You think this is a bad idea?” she pipes up, voice small and uncertain though she _feels_ so certain; about this, about them. She’s as certain this is right as she is certain that she’s breathing. “You and me?”

“Well,” Frank chuckles, tightening his hold on her, grinning cheekily, “I think that depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”


	8. August

“It’s all gonna come down to Roa’s vote; he could go either way.”

“Nevada’s more purple than it used to be. Maybe he won’t go for it.”

“He’s close with my dad, though. The whole Latino politicians buddy-buddy BS. And he’s up for reelection; my dad’ll funnel money into super PACs against him if he doesn’t, he knows that.”

“God bless America,” Connor chimes in from the couch, behind where she and Michaela are crouched on the floor, eyes glued to the television playing C-SPAN, the vote on the Senate floor playing out before them. “Land of the free, home of guns, politicians who fuck over poor people in their state for money, and a piece of shit president.”

Connor’s boyfriend, Oliver, smacks him on the arm, glancing over at the armchair where Frank is seated. “Shh! Maybe don’t… say that around a Secret Service agent.”

Frank quirks a brow. “What do you think we are, the KGB?”

“You have permission to talk about how much my dad sucks,” Laurel chimes in. “For the record.”

“What’s he doing in here anyway?” Connor asks, the question directed at Laurel. “Don’t they wait outside, or something?”

She shrugs, nonchalant as anything, and glances over her shoulder at Frank. “He’s my boyfriend.”

“You’re… wait, you’re dating one of your Secret Service?” Oliver leans in, apparently possessing the same penchant for drama Michaela has, albeit much more subdued. “Isn’t that… I don’t know, ethically questionable… from a professionalism standpoint?”

“Shh!” Michaela shushes them. “Roa’s almost up.”

Laurel’s never been much interested in politics; especially not in dry, droll Senate proceedings, and she’d usually have to be restrained with her eyelids stapled back to watch C-SPAN for any significant amount of time – but the whole of Washington is holding its breath, today, and her with it, as a room full of stodgy old rich white men decides the future of Medicaid and Planned Parenthood and a shitton of other programs in their latest attempt at a budget resolution fulfilling her father’s campaign promise to – well. Fuck everything up royally, in layman’s terms.

She really can’t fathom why anyone thought putting white men in charge of the country was a sound idea in the first place. She tries not to think about it much.

Michaela, ever the political junkie, had invited her over to watch the vote. Michaela’s self-proclaimed gaybors, Connor and Oliver, had invited _them_ selves over as well. Frank had come inside with her, subtlety be damned – and together they’d formed a small, sad, dismal little watch party. She’s only just met Connor and Oliver, and she doesn’t like Connor much but Oliver seems affable enough, if mildly terrified by the presence of Frank.

The Senate clerk’s voice fades back into her consciousness, bit by bit.

“Mr. Pace.”

“Aye.” 

“Mrs. Pullins.”

“No.”

“Mr. Roa.”

A pause. Laurel doesn’t think it’s for dramatic effect; Roa, from what she’s heard about him, has never been a showboat. She holds her breath, leans half an inch closer. She thinks the others do the same.

Then-

“Aye.”

“Fuck,” Michaela breathes, beside her, hands pressed to her cheeks. “That _bastard_.”

“My father pulled it out,” Laurel remarks, under her breath, disappointed but not at all surprised. “The son of a bitch did it.” Probably had to blow every single remaining cent of his dwindling political capital to do it. But he did it.

“God dammit,” Frank remarks, reclining back in the chair beside her. “My folks’re gonna lose their health coverage now.”

“Shame,” Connor pitches in, sounding only vaguely concerned. “Guess we should cancel our bulk order of Roa jerseys then, huh?”

“Don’t be a dick,” Oliver chides, and tosses one of Michaela’s butterfly-printed throw pillows his way. “Just because this doesn’t affect you doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect… millions of people! Planned Parenthood was where I found out I was pos.”

Michaela stands, switching off the television, upper lip curled in disgust. “Planned Parenthood was the only women’s clinic in the county when I lived in a Louisiana swamp. It’s just so – it’s _bullshit_ , them getting away with this. This is exactly why we don’t let white men run things.” She pauses, looking at Frank and ostensibly deciding to be nice, for once. “No offense.”

He shrugs. “None taken.”

“There’s a march. On the National Mall,” Michaela says suddenly, determination in the set of her jaw, gleaming in her eyes like embers. She takes a step forward decisively, reaching for her phone. “They organized it ahead of time in case it passed. I’m covering it. And you two-” She gestures to Connor and Oliver, “are going. Wear pink.”

Laurel steps forward, raising her chin before she can allow herself so much as a millisecond of hesitation. “I’ll come too.”

Frank blinks, as does Michaela. “Uh, what?”

“I’m going with you,” she says again, more forcefully this time, filled all at once with rage and indignation with no way to express it, the pressure building in her blood until her veins feel likely to rupture. “It’s not a good idea, I know. But I’m coming, so. Find me something pink.”

Michaela seems shocked, as shocked as Laurel feels at herself for this sudden streak of boldness, but if she doesn’t act now and commit she has a feeling she’ll back out, back down. Stay quiet. And she’s _tired_ of staying quiet, sitting pretty and crossing her legs and smiling for the cameras, the docile politician’s daughter. She feels almost adrenaline-drunk, and after Michaela and the others clear the room, Frank pulls her aside by the door, voice lowered, clearly displeased.

“Hey,” he undertones. “This ain’t a good idea.”

She bristles. “Weren’t you the one who told me I should go out, tell the world what I really think about my father?

“That isn’t why,” Frank urges. “You go out there, go into a crowd we didn’t vet – you got no clue what could go down, Laurel. One loon’s enough. Don’t be stupid about this.”

She knows, rationally, that his concerns are entirely founded. He’s right, as he usually is when it comes to matters of her personal safety – but it’s been ages since she was just another face among the crowd, one single voice in a swelling chant, and maybe it’s dumb, some teenage rebellion, and certainly it’s stupid, but she shakes her head, unyielding.

“I’m _going_ ,” she repeats, then softens somewhat, moving closer to him. “I’ll be okay. You’ll be there. Still… got one good lung to catch a bullet in, right?”

Frank doesn’t laugh, or even smirk. “Don’t go makin’ jokes about this. I want you safe.”

“I will be,” she soothes, and takes a step closer, laying a hand on one of his lapels. “You’ll keep me safe. And this is… what you said I should do, right? The equivalent of going on MSNBC and telling him to fuck off. Maybe I’ll donate my trust fund to Planned Parenthood. Icing on the cake.”

Finally, Frank relents, a smile worming its way onto his lips, an affectionate twinkle in his eye that warms her all over. “You’re somethin’ else, you know that?”

“Mmm,” she hums, eyeing his tie with a look of contemplation. “Now, let’s see if Oliver has a pink tie. Really get you decked out.”

 

~

 

She almost slips into the crowd unnoticed.

Almost. Because – well, she has four Secret Service agents who are not at all inconspicuously dressed around her. They’re kind of ruining the whole _wallflower_ thing for her.

She hasn’t marched in protest since a few ill-advised rallies during her years at Brown, and she’d forgotten what the energy of the crowd feels like, the way it swells and gathers and coalesces into something that feels infinitely larger than what they are; people, voices. A message. Solidarity. Michaela marches at the front, Laurel by her side, and for the first time in ages, centuries, she feels like she has a voice. She feels _heard_ , when for so long it’s felt as if she were screaming on the inside of a soundproof padded cell, beating against the walls, clawing to break free. Muzzled like a dog. She was suffocating, slowly drowning, but now – now, this feels like finally coming up for air, gulping it greedily into her lungs.

Frank and the others press in close, surround her. She catches sight of his pink tie when they do; a little something borrowed, courtesy of Oliver. The August sun is blazing, the air thick and muggy almost to the point of unpleasantness, and she can hardly hear her own thoughts over the shouts of the crowd, the coordinated chants. Once one photographer notices her, they descend like buzzards, but she marches on, head held high, as if she barely sees them at all.

This is stupid. She can imagine the headlines now, the social media firestorm, the wrath of her father. She’s so tired of biting her tongue. She’s drunk on the energy of the crowd, head fuzzy, half-mad, and maybe she has gone mad; being cooped up in the White House and set out on display like a doll whenever she’s needed would drive anyone mad.

She turns to Frank, all at once, his forehead glistening with sweat, sun reflecting off his sunglasses, and moves in close, still keeping pace with the crowd, drawn in by the force of his gravity. He’s by her side; steady, faithful. By her side in the public eye, technically, and yet he _isn’t_ ; he can never be, perhaps, even if he’s her boyfriend, though in all honesty boyfriend has always felt like a bit of an odd title to apply to Frank when there’s nothing even remotely boyish about him.

The media speculated about her and Kan’s breakup for a hot minute, before losing interest the next news cycle. She hasn’t given them anything _to_ speculate about since.

But if she’s causing a scandal today, really, why not go all out.

“Kiss me,” she says, suddenly, and she can’t see Frank’s eyes but she’d be willing to bet they quadruple in size.

“What?”

“Kiss me,” Laurel echoes, their words muffled by the roar of the crowd, and suddenly the crowd might as not be there at all. Suddenly they’re the last two humans on earth and the world is on mute around them, and her vision fades out, going soft around the edges, blurred. “Right now.”

“You lost your damn mind?” he growls, but it doesn’t come from a place of anger; it’s more surprise, than anything.

It’s a bad idea; the bad idea to end all bad ideas, the damn cherry on top of this Deluxe Bad Idea Sundae. They can’t allow themselves the luxury of openness; there’s more riding on this than a few scandalized articles in the tabloids and gossip rags, but somehow this feels like now or never, to Laurel, like holding out her hand and plunging down a waterfall with him, into the unknown. All in, she’d promised. And she can’t be _all in_ behind closed doors, hidden away in darkness; she isn’t enough of an idiot to fool herself into thinking he’s content with that, either. There’s a painful longing for that elusive more. _This_ is that more.

He said he wouldn’t let her fall. If they fall now, they fall together.

She comes to a halt. The crowd parts like a sea around them, continuing on towards the Lincoln Memorial, passersby eyeing them with a general combination of suspicion and annoyance. She can feel Bonnie and Nate and Asher’s gazes burning into her back, and yet everything stills, winds down to slow-motion, to a barely discernible hum in the background.

“You said all in,” she tells him, straight-faced, unflappable. “So go all in.”

She’s calling his bluff. She can’t see Frank’s eyes, but she can sense the instant something changes in the air between them, and all at once he’s moving forward, cameras be damned, drawing her against him and leaning down and seizing her lips with his with a dramatic, Harlequin romance novel sort of swoop.

He isn’t bluffing. She surges against him, into his mouth, pulling him closer.

She isn’t, either.    

 

~

 

_‘Screwing the Secret Service?! First Daughter Spotted Macking on New Bodyguard Beau!’_

Laurel has to bite back an audible groan as she reads the six hundredth headline on her Google Alerts. What is it with these viral clickbait sites and shitty, gratuitous alliteration?

_This is a White House scandal for the history books! First daughter Laurel Castillo, the 24-year-old daughter of President Jorge Castillo, was spotted not only marching in protest of the GOP’s recent budget resolution defunding Planned Parenthood that passed the Senate on Tuesday, but also snogging a Secret Service agent on her detail in the process. Talk about one big middle finger to El Presidente!_

_Word on the street is that the agent in question, Frank Delfino, has been placed on unpaid administrative leave while the Secret Service conducts an internal investigation. See gentlemen, this is why you don’t mix business and-_

“The President will see you now,” her father’s secretary announces from her place behind her desk outside the door to the Oval, jolting Laurel out of her state of concentration.

She ignores the overtly judgy glare the woman gives her, takes a deep breath to steel herself as if entering into battle, and slips her phone back into her pocket, stepping inside the office and closing the door behind her. She’s fully prepared to weather the Category Five hurricane of fury that is her father; she just wishes she were a little less sober right about now, in all honesty, and yet somehow, still, she’s eerily calm.

He’s standing at one of the windows behind his desk when she enters, staring out over the South Lawn, clad in a pressed charcoal grey suit and black leather oxford shoes. He turns when he hears her enter, but doesn’t move a muscle, just observes her with a cold, calculating, measured silence; he isn’t quick to anger, isn’t one to yell, but his quiet rage is almost more frightening, the serpent beneath the flower. He’s ruthless, and he understands the importance of silence – and she hates it, hates herself for it, but she’d learned that from him. Learned to aim her silence like a loaded gun and fire away.

She’s learned so much from him. But she’ll be damned if she ever admits it.

“Are you happy with yourself, mija?” is the first thing he asks, more wearily than anything. She thinks to herself, briefly, that he looks a decade older than he did when he took this office, though it’s been less than a year. “I mean, did you get what you wanted with that little act of… high school rebellion? I thought you were above that.”

This… this she hates more than anything; the condescension, the inherent infantilization in his words. He’s always treated her like a child though he stole her childhood away almost a decade ago – or _let_ it be stolen, rather, and she seethes, but makes a concentrated effort not to let it show. Anger implies irrationality. She _isn’t_ irrational. She can’t come out the gate yelling and screaming if she wants to get him to listen.

Laurel doesn’t answer. He shakes his head, as if in disappointment.

“Do you have… _any_ idea what you’ve done? Going around flaunting your disobedience? Undermining my agenda? Spreading your legs for the help? I can’t turn on CNN without seeing those pictures shoved in my face.” He makes his way over to her, markedly angrier than he was before, yet still quiet, controlled. “If I look like I can’t control my own children, how am I supposed to look like I can control the country?”

“Maybe you can’t.” She meets his eyes, and they’re cutting grey, gleaming like knives. They’re her eyes. “Maybe… you shouldn’t be.”

There’s a flicker of confusion on his face; clearly he hadn’t been expecting her to talk back, had been expecting her to stand here and take it like a scolded child and be some sort of silent, shrinking violet, come crawling on her knees for fucking forgiveness.

He raises his eyebrows, smirking. “You talking in riddles now?”

Frank’s words circle in her head. _Shit, Laurel. He oughta be fuckin’ terrified of you._

Yes, yes he sure as hell ought to be.

“Do you remember the names of the Mexican police officers who rescued me from that house, when I was kidnapped?” she deadpans, without warning. She swears she isn’t imagining the nearly imperceptible clench in her father’s jaw when she does. “Because I do. Nicolas Gonzalez. Ivan Reyes Arzate. Nidia Garcia.” She lists the names off effortlessly, spitting them like poisoned darts, laced with venom. When her father doesn’t answer, she presses, “You don’t? Or maybe you do. You make yearly payments to them out of your Swiss bank account, don’t you? And I’m sure there’re others. Employees at the State Department. Did you factor hush money into next year’s budget package or are you just… embezzling that from Antares still?”

Her father blinks. He looks almost amused, but that amusement is darkened with something else; not quite fear, but a dawning realization that perhaps he isn’t so certain who he’s dealing with here after all, reaching out his hand to a lion cub only to have it damn near chomped off. He’s underestimated her. He has been all her life; _everyone_ has.

She _is_ a lion, now. A lion that knows her own strength. 

He raises his eyebrows. “What is it you’re implying, mija?”

She barely recognizes herself when she opens her mouth, her words low, even. “I’ll track them down, those officers. Go public about the kidnapping. I’ll do the daytime talk show circuit. Write a bestselling novel. Everywhere you go, you’ll see my face. And so will the rest of the country. And I don’t think America would want to reelect a president who left his daughter to die, do you?”

“Don’t do something you’ll regret here, Laurel,” he warns, unflinching. There are an increasing number of cracks in his composure, though he hides them well. “You know where your mother is? I’ve heard it’s very… comfortable. She’d be glad to have company.”

She tries not to flinch at the thought. She expected this, of course: she threatens him, he threatens her back. She’d even anticipated he’d say exactly that – and yet still the idea festers in her mind, gnawing at her like acid, until she forces herself to shake it away.

“You wouldn’t do that,” she says with certainty – because she _is_ certain. He wouldn’t. She’s calling his bluff too, now. His hand is looking increasingly weak. She pauses, letting herself stabilize. “Involuntarily committing your daughter to a psych ward? It’s bad PR. Maybe even worse than what I’d do.” She swallows, shaking, meeting his eyes. She’s aware, for the first time, of her own power, standing toe to toe with the most powerful man in the world in the Oval Office and watching him slowly shrink before her. “Because I wouldn’t stop. Not until this whole administration goes down. You left me for dead.” She clenches her jaw. “I’ll do the same thing to you.”

There’s only silence, for a moment. And then, finally-

“What is it you want?”

He’s backing down. Folding. It takes Laurel a moment to realize it – because Jorge Castillo is, above all, a businessman. He recognizes risk versus reward. He’s determined, in this case, that it’s unwise to take the chance, and, now… now he’s willing to make a deal.

She has the upper hand, here. The realization rattles through her like an electric shock.

“Frank keeps his job. I keep my trust fund. I go to Middleton Law, and he comes with me, on my detail. You ask the media, publicly, to leave us alone. And…” She drifts off, raising her chin. “I leave. I leave and I don’t come back.”

If Jorge Castillo truly were the sentimental family man he makes himself out to be, perhaps he’d hesitate, right then; ask her not to forsake her family, her father who loves her. Instead, without even bothering with any pretense of paternal affection, he nods, folding his arms.

“If that is what you want.”

She doesn’t wait for him to say another word, or dismiss her. Laurel turns to go without another word, heading for the door, but just as she’s about to pull it open, her father’s voice sounds out to stop her.

“You know, I may not be happy with you, mija,” he calls out, something like a twisted, lukewarm pride in his eyes, “but I admire you. You truly are my daughter.”

The words burrow under her skin like ticks as she leaves – and yet, for the first time in her life, as she closes the door behind her, she feels it. Free.

She’s free.

 

~

 

She shows up at Frank’s door that evening with a bottle of wine, two train tickets, and Bonnie, Nate, and Asher in tow.

She hadn’t snuck out through the tunnels, for once. She’d walked right out the door, and every agent in command central knows perfectly well where she is. They’d managed to get her inside through the elevator in the parking garage, the outside of Frank’s building teeming with paparazzi; she knows he’s been hunkered down for days until the shitstorm blows over, though it shows no signs of letting up anytime soon.

He comes to the door in a black t-shirt and jeans, hands tucked into his pockets – ‘unemployment chic,’ as he’d called it via text. When he sees her, his lips quirk up into a small, soft little smile, the one he reserves for her and her alone.

This is all a mess. Maybe it was a mistake. But more and more, just looking at him now, she’s sure it was a mistake worth the making.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she greets back, smiling. “I, uh, brought wine. As promised. Also-” She reaches down to her feet, where she’d set a grocery bag. “You said you were out of milk. I know you can’t go outside without being mobbed.”

Frank steps aside, beckoning her to enter. “You really do know the way to my heart.”

The rest of her detail stay outside when he shuts the door, lowering their eyes and biting their tongues. Even Asher has gotten better at being discrete, and it feels like a weight lifting from her chest when Frank deadbolts it behind her, closing them off from the outside world, if only for the night. Frank’s apartment is small, but more cozy than cramped, and she’s always liked small places, preferred them over cold, empty square-footage. The air conditioner in his apartment barely works, and she flushes from the rising heat as she settles down onto the leather couch, accepting the glass of wine he holds out to her.

The train tickets are nestled away in the pocket of her jeans. She doesn’t pull them out at first.

“So,” he begins, as he sinks down beside her, letting her settle her legs over his lap. “You here to be the bearer of bad news? Won’t be _as_ bad, at least, comin’ from you.”

She frowns. “They’re not firing you.”

He raises his eyebrows. “I’m on unpaid leave and they’re doin’ an internal investigation. That’s Secret Service code for toast. Surprised Annalise hasn’t done it already.”

“No, I mean… I _know_ they’re not firing you.”

Frank grins, scoffing. “And how do you know that?”

“Because,” she says, as flippant as she can manage, “I talked to my dad.”

Now he seems utterly confounded. “Thought you said he’d kill me. Literally. I been closin’ my curtains in case he plants snipers on the building across the street.”

“He would, maybe. But.” She takes a sip of her wine, giving a soft huff. “I did what you said. Told him I’d go public about the kidnapping. Scared the shit out of him. You were right.” She smiles. “He should’ve been terrified of me all along.”

“Holy shit,” he breathes. “You really did it.”

“What, you didn’t think I had it in me?”

“’Course I did. But damn,” he remarks, shaking his head, astounded. “You got balls, Castillo.”

“Damn right I do. And… I _also_ got these.” She shifts, reaching into her back pocket for the printout of their tickets, which she hands to him, beaming. “Two tickets to Philly.”

Frank scans them for a moment, his face lighting up. “Your dad ain’t flyin’ us out on Air Force One?”

“I’m slumming it with you, remember? Maybe this time we’ll go see the Liberty Bell.”

“So we’re doin’ this,” he says, all at once, as though the thought has only just now occurred to him. “We’re really goin’ to Philly.”

“Cold feet?” she teases.

“Not if I got you to keep ‘em warm at night. Hey, really, y’know, this’ll up my effectiveness. Round the clock bedside protection. I’m dedicated, you gotta gimme that.”

“Mmm. You gonna sleep with that baton thing on you then?”

“Don’t mock the baton,” he mock-chides as she descends into laughter. “Walk tall, carry a big stick. And it ain’t the only big stick I carry.”

She chortles. “You’re the worst.”

“You’re the best,” he counters, grinning like a dope. Laurel rolls her eyes, setting down her wine and maneuvering herself over to him until she’s seated on his lap, straddling him.

“You should get packing, y’know. Time’s a wasting.”

“Nah. We got all the time in the world, you 'n me,” Frank purrs, tipping her forward until she goes tumbling down onto the couch in a giggling, flushed heap. “Let’s waste a little, first.”                                                                                    


	9. September

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhh I'm FULLY aware of how much I suck. For some reason I kept putting off and putting off this chapter although I always intended for it to be pretty short n sweet and a way to just tie everything together.
> 
> As one last reminder, [here](https://8tracks.com/aghamora1/ss-au) is the playlist for this fic for any time you feel like rereading. This was truly a journey, and thank you guys so much for sticking with me through it. Drop me a line in the comments or on [Tumblr](http://laurelcasfillo.tumblr.com/ask) n let me know what you think.
> 
> Peace ouuuuuuut.

The townhouse smells of floor polish and fresh paint when she steps inside for the first time.

It’s bigger than she needs, admittedly, but excessive square-footage practically runs in her blood, and when she’d seen the pictures online she’d known immediately it was meant for her. Good location, near campus. Open floor plan, with a lot of natural light and a large bay window in the living room, letting that light stream through freely. High ceilings. Freshly-painted crisp white walls. A staircase in the foyer, leading up to the second floor. Unfurnished, with her belongings only partly moved in, but it will be soon. It’s not a mansion, by any means. But it’s enough. It has all she needs.

And the sight of Frank trailing behind her, taking it all in with her, only reinforces that notion.

“Damn,” he mutters, coming to a stop beside her in the middle of the empty room. “Good thing you negotiated for your trust fund, huh?”

She rolls her eyes. “Please. I’d sooner live in a cardboard box than that place ever again.”

That _place_. The White House, imposing, stately symbol of the American presidency, and her prison for what had felt like eons. She hadn’t realized what living there had truly done to her until the second she got off the train in Philly. She can breathe, again, free and easy, raise her arms and twirl in circles and fall on the floor, do a back handspring across to the kitchen. There’s so much space here, and it’s her own, completely and utterly _hers_.

One of the _two_ things that’s completely hers, here.

Because without waiting another second Laurel strides over to Frank, closing the gap between them and slinging her arms around the back of his neck, raising herself to his height as best she can. She’s like the surging tide in a storm, crashing into his body without warning, and he simply lets her wash over him, yields to her mouth eagerly. He opens to her with no resistance at all, because all that resistance and restraint is another thing they left behind in D.C., along with polite smiles and secret trysts and furtive glances, all those weapons in their arsenal to conceal the truth of what they were to each other.

They don’t need them, here, and they never will again.

“Yeah right, rich girl like you?” he scoffs, after they pull apart. She stays there with her arms locked around him, body pressed in close. “You’d make it livin’ in a box for twenty minutes. _Maybe_ thirty.”

Laurel feigns disappointment. “What, you wouldn’t come live with me?”

“You know I would. Only problem with livin’ in a box, y’know…” There’s a mischievous glint in his eye. “Ain’t much privacy. For… certain things.”

“Oh, that’s the only problem? Dying of exposure doesn’t factor in for you?”

“Nah.”

She’s laughing before she can help it, and he leans in and swallows her laughter down until he chimes in with his own. The warm late afternoon light pours over them, outlining their bodies in a shimmer of gold, and when Laurel looks up at him, meeting his eyes, she half-thinks she’s in the middle of a dream, for a split second.

Fucking insane, how it all worked out. Utterly improbable. But they’ve made the improbable and impossible possible after all, wading their way through this mess together until they came out on the other side. She has a new life, here, and Washington and the White House and her father all feel like nightmares that’ve already begun to fade from memory. They stand in the sun for a while in silence, and it’s a silence they don’t need to fill, a silence they got so little of before that she wants to cherish every second – until Frank finally decides to break it.

“What if I said somethin’ crazy right now?” he asks suddenly, a sly grin on his face. “A hypothetical. The askin’ for a friend kinda thing.”

She narrows her eyes. “Like what?”

“Well, see, I got this friend. And he’s totally head over heels for this girl. If there’s a level beyond whipped… he’s damn pulverized. And, I mean, can’t blame him. She’s a total catch. Smart. Funny. Witty. Hot as hell. Whole package type thing.” He pauses, drifting off. “Top it all off, she’s the president’s daughter. But that don’t define her. She’s her own before that, before she’s anyone’s anything. Hard-headed, too. Think that’s why he’s in so deep. And he’s thinkin’ about tellin’ her he loves her. But it’s kinda soon, he doesn’t wanna scare her off. Doesn’t wanna fuck up a good thing. Just thought I’d, y’know…” He smirks, but there’s a tentativeness behind it as he gauges her reaction, trying to discern if he’s gone too far. “Get your opinion. See what you think. For a friend.”

She should freeze. She should be scared stiff by this hypothetical, want to bolt, because once upon a time she would have, and a sizable part of her still does, she can’t lie. She doesn’t say those words back freely, hand them out left and right like damn candy on Halloween to anyone who comes asking; she doesn’t even _feel_ that freely, and she doesn’t now, either. She needs more time than they’ve had, but there’s a voice in her head and feeling in her bones that’s telling her she could, one day.

There’s time to be had, after all.

“Can I be frank with you?” she quips, and Frank chuckles. “I think… your friend might have a shot. Think she might say it back.”

His eyes light up, though he plays it cool. “Might? What kinda odds we talkin’ here?”

“Mmm. 50/50.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Not great odds.”

“Maybe,” she concedes. “But they’ll get better, I think.”

They’ll get better. His odds will. She will. _They_ will. There’s nothing for them to do now _but_ get better. And things won’t be normal, she knows that damn well. Normal isn’t something she can go back to, but they can find a new normal together, and she knows as well as anyone that new normals aren’t all bad. If none of this had happened, she never would have found him, and she’s not a big proponent of _everything happens for a reason_ or _stars aligning_ or any of that flowery bullshit, but really, she has no idea what else it could be.

In her new normal, before, she found him. There’s no telling what they’ll find in this one.

“And, uh… speaking of those _things_ you talked about needing privacy for earlier…” She trails off, fingers tracing idly around the neckline of his shirt. “Bed got delivered this morning.”

Frank, shockingly enough, doesn’t seize the opportunity. “As tempting as christening the mattress sounds, we got plans. Put on your Sunday best, I’ll let ‘em know to get the car ready.”

“My Sunday best?” she snorts. “Where’re we going, the Liberty Bell?”

“Very funny,” he says, nodding toward the staircase. “It’s the notorious Delfino Sunday dinner, tonight. My ma’s making lasagna. And we better scram; she doesn’t like to be kept waitin’.” He must notice the shock in her eyes right then, because he smiles. “What? I said you should come with one day, didn’t I?”

He did. She remembers it like it was yesterday, standing out in front of his family home in the middle of the night. She was the president’s daughter and he didn’t feel the need to take her anywhere extravagant, show off his hometown in some flashy way, impress her. He’d just taken her home.

It takes her a moment to snap out of the memory, and once she does, she follows him up the stairs. They dress together, in the fading daylight, and after they make their way back down the stairs she pauses at the front door, for a moment, to prepare herself for what lies beyond it; a black Suburban, agents all in black to go with it, lingering pieces of the life she can’t escape, like a skin she can never shed. But then Frank is taking her hand, smiling and leading her out the door, and suddenly she hardly cares at all, can hardly see anyone except him anyway.

She gives one last backward glance into the house before closing the door behind her; large and empty, in an unfamiliar city full of unfamiliar faces. She’d been sure once that she would feel alone, starting over in a place like this, but she doesn’t. Not at all.

With him by her side, it’s already starting to feel like home.

**FIN**


End file.
